Having a shorthand makes it a lot easier for people to freak out and panic unnecessarily, too. "Heartbleed" was big enough to warrant a world-wide freakout, but this is a remote buffer overflow with many requirements for success.
From http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/01/27/9 :
--[ 3 - Mitigating factors ]--------------------------------------------------
The impact of this bug is reduced significantly by the following reasons:
- A patch already exists (since May 21, 2013), and has been applied and
tested since glibc-2.18, released on August 12, 2013:
- The gethostbyname*() functions are obsolete; with the advent of IPv6,
recent applications use getaddrinfo() instead.
- Many programs, especially SUID binaries reachable locally, use
gethostbyname() if, and only if, a preliminary call to inet_aton()
fails. However, a subsequent call must also succeed (the "inet-aton"
requirement) in order to reach the overflow: this is impossible, and
such programs are therefore safe.
- Most of the other programs, especially servers reachable remotely, use
gethostbyname() to perform forward-confirmed reverse DNS (FCrDNS, also
known as full-circle reverse DNS) checks. These programs are generally
safe, because the hostname passed to gethostbyname() has normally been
pre-validated by DNS software:
. "a string of labels each containing up to 63 8-bit octets, separated
by dots, and with a maximum total of 255 octets." This makes it
impossible to satisfy the "1-KB" requirement.
. Actually, glibc's DNS resolver can produce hostnames of up to
(almost) 1025 characters (in case of bit-string labels, and special
or non-printable characters). But this introduces backslashes ('\\')
and makes it impossible to satisfy the "digits-and-dots"
requirement.
You would effectively have to control the DNS server, or spoof its responses, to get the software to accept a suitable exploit.