I believe cperciva's more trying to convey deep existential angst moreso than immediate threat.

His post is shot in black and white, as he is smoking while sitting in an cafe on an otherwise abandoned European street, when the desultory wind blows in a creased newspaper with the headline "MODULAR MATH FOUND NOT TO WORK", and he turns to look at the camera with a slowly developing look of pure horror that the camera person spends a full 5 minutes in exploring every last nuance of. Just over two minutes in, a violinist wearing a tutu wanders in, plays some 12-tone music, delivers a poorly subtitled rumination on the ultimate futility of life and its connection to prime number elliptic curves, and then leaves, for no apparent reason.

It's moving stuff, for certain audiences.

Maybe. The problem with getting such fundamental things wrong is that it's almost impossible to figure out every possible way to exploit it.

I haven't looked at the code in question, but I'd be willing to bet that the NSA has figured out a way to exploit the broken multiplication which is completely unlike what the OpenSSL authors were considering.