Hackers Beware

Types of Buffer Overflow Attacks

By nature of how a buffer overflow attack works, an attacker can compromise a machine in one of two ways: by a denial of service attack or gaining access. The easiest type of buffer overflow attack is to crash the machine or cause a Denial of Service attack. Buffer overflow attacks work by putting too much data onto the memory stack, which causes other information that was on the stack to be overwritten. As you can imagine, important information like operating system data needs to be stored and accessed from the memory stack to ensure that the system functions properly.

With a buffer overflow attack, if enough information can be overwritten in memory, the system cannot function, and the operating system will ...