Buffer overflows—A refresher

Buffer overflows are the bread and butter of attackers in the wild. When this type of vulnerability is properly exploited, an attack may lead to complete system compromise in mere seconds. Ideally, many of these vulnerabilities may be prevented by the proper implementation of a security development lifecycle. If your client does not have such practices, you may be required to perform steps above and beyond standard penetration testing and prove that there are flaws in the (often internally developed) applications being deployed across the enterprise.

Note

Not all buffer overflow vulnerabilities can be used to create remote exploits. Also of note is that not all buffer overflows are exploitable.

More often than not, programming errors that allow for buffer overflows are not intentional, or due to lazy developers. Frequently, buffer overflow vulnerabilities are missed during the application development stages because of either the complexity of the application, or...