Just Let It Flow

We all know that stepping over array bounds is easily managed in C and C++. So much so that the C standard library has a function, gets, which may as well be named ’cause_buffer_overflow’. The consequences of overflowing a buffer are also understood, pretty much anything can happen from nothing to corrupted variables to flat out crashing. To demonstrate just how serious this can be, I’d like to relay something based on a true story.