Many are the variables to be considered in order to describe the relevance of a topic as cybercrimes. All of them represent a justification for employing efforts toward the development of a programming code each more secure. In this context, a very representative example is the costs related to crimes exploiting failures in insecure codes. Anderson et al. (2013) presented a synthetic vision of the financial damage caused by those criminal actions. According to the authors, the costs generated by cyber tax frauds summed a total of 125,000 millions of dollars only in the year 2011.

Although a huge number of vulnerabilities have already been identified, many other ones are found every year. Some of the most common ones are related to the manipulation of variables storing data of type String and Integer. In general, hackers and other types of attackers take advantage of unappropriated memory allocations or of errors during the operations involving those data types. A very typical exploited error is known as buffer overflow. Mitigation strategies to avoid this kind of threat requires a sharp domain of the programming language used for developing the code. Besides, a strong understanding of the computer hierarchy of memory and the way data are represented on them may help programmers to develop software more secure and less error-prone. Hereafter, the aforementioned vulnerabilities will be discussed more deeply and the accordingly mitigation strategies will also be described in more detail.

Many are the variables to be considered in order to describe the relevance of a topic as cybercrimes. All of them represent a justification for employing efforts toward the development of a programming code each more secure. In this context, a very representative example is the costs related to crimes exploiting failures in insecure codes. Anderson et al. (2013) presented a synthetic vision of the financial damage caused by those criminal actions. According to the authors, the costs generated by cyber tax frauds summed a total of 125,000 millions of dollars only in the year 2011.
Although a huge number of vulnerabilities have already been identified, many other ones are found every year. Some of the most common ones are related to the manipulation of variables storing data of type String and Integer. In general, hackers and other types of attackers take advantage of unappropriated memory allocations or of errors during the operations involving those data types. A very typical exploited error is known as buffer overflow. Mitigation strategies to avoid this kind of threat requires a sharp domain of the programming language used for developing the code. Besides, a strong understanding of the computer hierarchy of memory and the way data are represented on them may help programmers to develop software more secure and less error-prone. Hereafter, the aforementioned vulnerabilities will be discussed more deeply and the accordingly mitigation strategies will also be described in more detail. […]