Question

I understand the concept of buffer overflow, and acknowledge it can give me the opportunity to execute my own code within a foreign executable.

My question is, cant this simply be done with easier ways ?

Say inject a DLL, and in DLLMain write your malicious code ?

Or play with the disassembly and inject assembly code into executable ?

And even if you got your malicious code working, what damage\profit can you get by the act, that you could not get by editing the disassembly by yourself ?

As far as I understand, the moment you got an executable in your hands you are the master of it, and can add\change\remove code by playing with the disassembly, why make all the effort for searching for exploits ?

Thanks, Michael.

Answer 1

Thing is, you don’t generally get the victim to run your executable. So the fact that you can make it malicious is of little value.

Instead you can get the potential victim to use your input: that’s why it’s so interesting.