Holy crap!
If this is true it's arguably the most scandalous NSA story yet:
The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.
As you've probably already read, the Heartbleed bug is a catastrophic security hole in the OpenSSL protocol, which underlies the HTTPS security of over half a million web servers on the internet. The bug has existed for over two years and there's no way to know how many of those servers have been exploited over that time or what confidential information was exposed:
The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.
Basically, an attacker can grab 64K of memory from a server. The attack leaves no trace, and can be done multiple times to grab a different random 64K of memory. This means that anything in memory -- SSL private keys, user keys, anything -- is vulnerable. And you have to assume that it is all compromised. All of it.
Here's the problem as I see it: the NSA has two mandates - to protect U.S. information systems and to produce foreign intelligence information. What this story indicates more dramatically than any other NSA story we've seen so far is that they have effectively abandoned the former mission in favor of the latter. I don't care how useful they may have found this vulnerability. Leaving it out there once they knew of it was unforgivably reckless. The damage done is literally incalculable.
It's time to split this agency in two - one devoted solely to data protection, the other devoted to legitimate foreign intelligence gathering.