Computer Memory Hacking
By: Christopher Slaton
Professor Jamaz Hall CIS 106

The corruption of memory occurs in a program when the contents of a memory location are unintentionally modified due to programming errors; this is termed violating memory safety. Later in the program when the corrupted contents are used it usually leads to program crash or to erratic computer behavior. About 10% of application crashes on Windows systems are due to heap corruption. There are a host of applications that are designed to efficiently develop system software. Programming languages such as C and C++ contain powerful features memory management and pointer arithmetic. These features are designed for developing efficient applications and system software. Memory corruption is one of the most intractable class of programming errors.

Computer memory hacking is the practice of modifying computer hardware and software

to accomplish a goal outside of the creators original purpose. People who engage in computer

hacking activities are often called hackers. While some hackers aren’t worried about the or

concerned about the consequences of there actions, there is little debate about the fact that

hacking has several negative effects. Businesses and governments spend an enormous amount of

money to prevent damage from hacking. Hacking on a large scale can cause extensive website

damage, an long lasting inconvenience. Computer hacking is largely common among teenagers

and young adults. Many hackers are true technology intelligent beings, who enjoy learning more

about how computers work and consider computer hacking an “art” form. Quite often they enjoy

programming and have expert-level skills in one particular program. In most of these cases

hacking is a real life application of their problem solving skills as well as their persistence to

their craft. To them it’s more about an opportunity to demonstrate their abilities than the

opportunity to harm others.

Because of the large number of hackers are self-taught, corporations have resorted to

employing computer hackers as a part of their technical support staff. The skills that these

particular individuals have aid companies in the consistent battle to keeps security systems

upgraded and protect them against future attacks. In most cases, this type of computer hacking

helps prevent identity theft and other serious computer related crimes.

Conversely there are a larger number of hackers that have less noble motives. There are

hackers that are out clearly for personal gain. They are out to steal personal information, change

a corporations financial data, break security codes to gain unauthorized network access, or

conduct other destructive activities, this individuals are called crackers.

Memory hacking also known as storage violation is a hardware fault that occurs when a

task attempts to access an area of the computer storage which isn’t permitted. A violation of

storage can be but not limited to reading from, writing to or freeing storage that is not owned by

the task. An example of this is stack buffer overflow. Stack buffer overflow is defined when a

program writes to a memory address on the programs call stack outside of the intended data

structure. When a program writes more data to a buffer located on the stack than what is actually

allocated this creates overflow bugs. This always causes some sort of corruption of adjacent data

on the stack, and in most cases where the overflow was triggered on unintentionally. This most

often cause the program to crash or become inoperable. Stack buffer overflow is a type of the

more general programming malfunction known as buffer overflow. When overfilling a buffer on

the stack it is most likely to derail program execution than overfilling a buffer on the heap

the stack contains return address. Stack buffer overflow when executed deliberately can be

referenced as a part of an attack known as stack smashing.

Reference 1

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