Er, the (in)famous Robert Tappan Morris worm of 1988 used a buffer overflow. Zatko may be a renowned security expert but he didn't invent the buffer overflow.
I'm inclined to believe everything he says about Twitter from my experience implementing Twitter APIs then constantly working around their incessant random breakage.
The earliest documented hostile exploitation of a buffer overflow was in 1988. It was one of several exploits used by the Morris worm to propagate itself over the Internet. The program exploited was a service on Unix called finger.
(source code here https://0x00sec.org/t/examining-the-morris-worm-source-code-... )
Later, in 1995, Thomas Lopatic independently rediscovered the buffer overflow and published his findings on the Bugtraq security mailing list.
A year later, in 1996, Elias Levy (also known as Aleph One) published in Phrack magazine the paper "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit", a step-by-step introduction to exploiting stack-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities.
> We discussed for a long time who in the hacking world today best
exemplifies everything that is right with hacking today, and we came
up with a unanimous conclusion that it was Mudge. And so we were quite
happy that our first choice for the first pro-phile that we have done
accepted our invitation. He cracked your Apple warez when you couldn't,
he wrote buffer overflows before they were cool, he owned your Sendmail
(and probably still does), and he still manages to give more back to the
community than anyone else around.
> Past handles: Many old Apple ][ crackers remember me by a different handle. That handle is long put to rest thanks to the government.
And just the other day I learned that Steve Wozniak got kicked out of UC Boulder, Colorado for hacking their mainframe. Tried to figure out what it was named - but sadly couldn't find the name. Thought it'd make a good name for my new laptop.
Literally every "researcher" in 1995 was working on this problem. I was in the room with Mudge at Pumpcon while he was doing the research work for this, with like a dozen other people. All of them were I believe primarily motivated by 8lgm --- that's why Mudge's post uses a contrived syslog(3) example instead of a real bug, because the 8lgm Sendmail exploit was an overflow in syslog(3).
It's fine, it's a solid post, it's an early post. But Lopatic and 8lgm set this in motion, and the actual blueprint for this attack was probably splitvt.
I'm inclined to believe everything he says about Twitter from my experience implementing Twitter APIs then constantly working around their incessant random breakage.