The 20-year-old bug, dubbed CVE-2024-9143, involves the software triggering an "out-of-bounds memory access," which can cause the program to crash or, in rare cases, execute rogue computer code.

But the reality is that it's often not vetted due to a lack of funding and human resource constraints. A good example of the potential impact of bugs in open source is Heartbleed, the bug in ...

Mayhem emerged from a 2016 government-sponsored contest at a Las Vegas casino hotel. Now it's used by the military.