CISA’s former Secure by Design chiefs launch their own software safety organization
da-kuk/Getty Images
ByDavid DiMolfetta,
Cybersecurity Reporter, Nextgov/FCW
November 9, 2026 08:00 AM ET
Lauren Zabierek and Bob Lord helped persuade hundreds of companies to pledge to build safer products. Now they want to evolve that work further.
In November 1996, a hacker writing as Aleph One showed readers of Phrack, an underground magazine for hackers, how an attacker could take control of a program simply by sending it more data than it could safely store. The extra data could spill into another part of the program’s memory and change which instructions it followed next, letting an attacker run code of their choosing.
The article, “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit,” walked readers through what’s known as a buffer overflow vulnerability. It turned 30 on Sunday, but the kind of flaw it described still turns up in software today.
That phenomenon —...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to www.nextgov.com. To see the full text click HERE
