Dive Brief:
- The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Wednesday warned that hackers are abusing buffer overflow vulnerabilities to launch malicious attacks against organizations.
- Buffer overflow vulnerabilities occur when a hacker gains access or writes information outside of the memory buffer, according to the advisory from the FBI and CISA.
- Buffer overflow vulnerabilities are prevalent issues in memory-safety software design that can lead to data corruption, program crashes, exposure of sensitive data and remote code execution.
Dive Insight:
The warning is part of a push by CISA to eliminate vulnerabilities during the software development phase by encouraging the use of memory safe languages.
The advisory is part of a wider effort called secure by design, which is an effort to shift the burden of product security toward manufacturers so enterprise customers don’t have to chase down vulnerabilities in their respective technology stacks.
Chris Wysopal, founder and chief security evangelist at Veracode, said buffer overflow vulnerabilities are commonly found in software written in C and C++ because the languages require the programmer to be perfect in managing memory, which is difficult.
The FBI and CISA described buffer overflow vulnerabilities as “unforgivable defects” and cited a number of specific CVEs recent years, including the following:
- A stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure, tracked as CVE-2025-0282.
- A vulnerability in Citrix Netscaler ADC and Netscaler Gateway, tracked as CVE-2023-6549.
- A critical vulnerability in VMware vCenter Server, tracked as CVE-2024-38812.
