They are under daily attack - in public, at tills, operated by minimum-wage earners.
> You probably had loads of vulnerabilities.
Sure. Hundreds of thousands of terminals sitting in the field, networked, under the control of minimum wage employees, each holding credit card details for hundreds of cards at a time...
Yeah, you're right, not a target at all!
> But also depending on when you did it, all you had to process was a bar code which is also isn’t some super complicated task.
You are hopelessly naive. Even in the magstripe era, certification was not easy.
> It’s just wild for me to encounter someone who believes C is a safe language
When did you meet this person?
Look, the bottom line is, the errors due to memory safety in programs written in C is so small it's a rounding error. It's not even statistical noise. You spent your life surrounded by these programs that, if they went wrong, would kill you, and yet here you are, not only arguing from a place of ignorance, you are reveling in it.
Just out of interest, have you ever used an LLM to write code for you?