The information appearing in memory isn’t a serious issue, your computer would need to be compromised while you’re using it. In which case all bets are off.

What’s concerning is the data potentially appearing in hibernation/swap files, and persisting on disk after shutdown. This would be rather serious, as someone stealing the computer could potentially recover the key.

Using full disk encryption would hopefully mitigate this.

“If your computer is already infected by malware that’s running in the background with the privileges of your user, this finding doesn’t make your situation much worse,” says the researcher, who goes by the handle “vdohney”.

“If you have a reasonable suspicion that someone could obtain access to your computer and conduct forensic analysis, this could be bad. Worst case scenario is that the master password will be recovered, despite KeePass being locked or not running at all.”