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Understanding Buffer Overflow Attacks
Overview The Internet Worm shutdown over 6,000 systems, just about cutting off all traffic on the Internet. One of the methods used to gain access to systems was a buffer overflow exploit of a UNIX service called finger. When you fingered a user, the finger service would return information about the user, for example, the user's real name and phone number. But the buffer overflow attack on finger replaced the server program with a UNIX command interpreter, or shell. This shell was then used to copy across a program that uploaded, linked, and then executed, a new copy of the Worm. Buffer overflow attacks remained relatively unheard of for many years following the Worm. One known example came in November of 1994, when one of the first commercial Webservers, running HP-UX (Hewlett-Packard UNIX), was successfully breached using a buffer overflow attack against the NCSA 1.3 Web server. As this Web server sat on the target's internal network and could be connected to through the firewall, the attackers had unfettered access to the victim's internal network. The attackers, calling themselves the Internet Liberation Front, had a field day.
| Publisher | Spirit.com | File Format | HTML |
|---|---|---|---|
| Date Published | November 1999 | Downloads | 3 |
| Format | White Papers | ||
| Topics | |||
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