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General discussion

'Buffer Overflow' Still A Problem

by Donna Buenaventura Nov 21, 2003 12:59AM PST

Fifteen years after the buffer overflow hacking technique was first used on a nascent Internet the method remains popular and troublesome

The Internet millions use today is much different from the one of fifteen years ago, however, the buffer overflow vulnerability is no less a problem. There are plenty of unchecked buffers for hackers to exploit in old code, and worse, new programs are also often ripe for the ploy despite all that we know about the problem and all the money and effort already put toward solving it.

http://www.viruslist.com/eng/index.html?tnews=1009&id=440590

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'Buffer Overflow' is older than 15 years...

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 21, 2003 1:32AM PST

In 1974 when I was writing my first Fortran programs, we noticed that:

1. Arrays could have data in them from prior programs. In fact, it was interesting to sift through such to see what the mainframe was used for at other times.

2. Later we were chastised for our "bad programs" that would call for an array, but exceed the size of the array. i.e. an array of c[1], but go look at [2],3,4 and so on. One team member decided to not only read such a position, but change the value there. The mainframe crashed and we were admonished to write better programs.

I will not do the date calculation, but it appears to me that the issue is much older than 15 years.

Bob

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