What are buffer overflow attacks?
Attackers love to throw huge amounts of malicious data at systems to see what limits have been set and to see if too much data crammed in a particular form field or URL string will crash the system — or lead to remote control of your servers. They will pack high-bit shellcode (a transferable piece of code used as the payload in the exploitation of a software bug) into a Web request, hoping that the developer has not placed any buffer limits on the request and is not sanitizing input into the Web application. Placing a limit on buffer characters easily helps to avoid this type of attack.
