ZDNet: Heartbleed is a great example of how spectacular security failures grab the popular imagination. There is another set of problems much less sexy and harder to fix: keeping standards progressing. As it happens, Heartbleed creates an opportunity to advance one of these standards: cryptographic hashes.
Because of their importance, a great deal of research, both black- and white-hat, is done on the important crypto functions. Over time, weaknesses will appear in even the state-of-the-art ones, sometimes just because computing power increases over time to the point where some brute force attacks become practical.
