Summary

   

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Cracks, Attacks, Exploits ”there's more than enough to worry about. This chapter covered some of the common attacks that you may encounter on an Internet-accessible or multiuser system. Denial of service attacks are aimed at disrupting legitimate use of a computer or its services. Buffer overflows take advantage of poorly debugged code that allows the contents of memory to be overwritten with arbitrary data. Session hijacking allows another computer to take control of your (seemingly) private conversation with a remote system.

There will always be something new on the horizon, and it is unlikely that bugs will ever disappear completely from source code. Users demand new features, new flexibility ”they want it now and they want it cheap. Programmers must pump out code quickly and are often not given the time nor incentive to produce error-free code. Remember that the next time you hear someone complaining about Apple charging for a system update.

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