Buffer overflows are basically about memory corruption. They can lead to crashes, remote code execution, if run in privileged code to privilege escalation, etc.<p>Most modern operating systems have buffer overflow protection technologies such as ASLR. I tried recently exploiting a few guaranteed buffer overflows for fun, and it&#x27;s getting irritatingly hard at least on Linux. Non-executable stack, *alloc functions have sanity checks, -fstack-protector provided canaries, ... It&#x27;s possible to get past all that, but it takes a bit work.<p>I would be freaked if I was running some older operating system, and someone vendored a poorly compiled version of libpng. Windows applications are probably the scariest here, especially when run on older Windows servers...