You know how annoying patches can be, right? Windows will auto update at the drop of a hat, dragging you out of a game at a crucial moment and forcing a restart without a by your leave. Or sometimes it’ll ask and then still ignore you anyway. Smug b@$t. And why does it need this constant sticking plaster of software patches? Because of system memory.

And it doesn’t matter whether it’s the cheapest stick of bare, green PCB Crucial RAM, or the latest $3,000 192GB kit Corsair is shipping out for that overclockable Intel Xeon. Memory, or memory safety, is reportedly the main reason for over 70% of the bug fixes that Microsoft engineers have to roll out for its software. Because of the way that Windows has been written as an OS, an errant code slip here, or a missed character there, could result in memory security exploits for a nefarious actor to use and gain access to a host of different machines.

This revelation came from Microsoft engineer, Matt Miller, talking at an Israel security conference, where he explained to the audience how memory safety bugs could be exploited, and how over the past 12 years at Microsoft 70% of all the patches the company released were to fix such memory bugs.