Buffer overflow vulnerabilities are one of the most common vulnerabilities. These kinds of vulnerabilities are perfect for remote access attacks because they give the attacker a great opportunity to launch and execute their attack code on the target computer. Broadly speaking, a buffer overflow attack occurs when the attacker intentionally enters more data than a program was written to handle. The data runs over and overflows the section of memory that was set aside to accept it. The extra data overwrites on top on another portion of memory that was meant to hold something else, like part of the program's instructions.

By Erica R. Thomas at Linux Security.

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