There are various security attacks on RAM. One is malware that can scrape memory e.g. for plaintext credit card numbers (once read into RAM prior to encryption). Modern systems aim to encrypt data as early as possible in the processing pipeline.
Privileged operators (e.g. cloud admins) can peek into RAM. This is why confidential VMs isolate memory to hide data-in-use from cloud providers.
DMA devices such as Thunderbolt peripherals can read system memory (and hence potentially sensitive data, from RAM). Modern operating systems restrict "hot-plug" DMA access.
Note: this list of compromise attacks is non-exhaustive. This is a big field of operations.
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