Understanding the Problem
Believe it or not, it is possible to exploit a program without understanding why that program is vulnerable. This is particularly true when you crash a program using a fuzzer. As long as you recognize which portion of your fuzzing input ends up in eip and determine a suitable place within the fuzzer input to embed your shellcode, you do not need to understand the inner workings of the program that led up to the exploitable condition.
However, from a defensive standpoint it is important that you understand as much as you can about the problem in order to implement the best possible corrective measures, which can include anything from firewall adjustments and intrusion detection signature development, to software patches. ...
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