Trilight Zone

[thedark]

A buffer overflow attack is when the attacker sends malformed packets to a service that causes the memory buffer to overflow. The cracker hopes this will cause the program to crash and defaulting into a root prompt. Buffer overflows happen because of programming errors where input was not checked to be valid.

To prevent buffer overflows, all code must be meticulously hand checked multiple times by multiple people. Since this is not often possible, to limit the chances of being successfully cracked by a buffer overflow attack.