Computer science and security experts have named buffer overflow as the most dangerous bug facing PC users.

A new paper published by the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology, and funded in part by DARPA, states that buffer overflows have been the most common form of security vulnerability for the past decade.

In a buffer overflow, an attacker floods a field, typically an address bar, with more characters than it can accommodate. The excess characters in some cases can be run as executable code, effectively giving the attacker control of the computer.

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