Ethical Hacking Essentials Practice Test

Which type of vulnerability did James exploit to crash the SCADA program?

1. Memory corruption

2. Code injection

3. SQL injection

4. Cross-site scripting

The correct answer is: Memory corruption

The type of vulnerability that James exploited to crash the SCADA program is memory corruption. Memory corruption vulnerabilities occur when an application inadvertently alters its memory contents, causing it to behave incorrectly or crash. This can happen through various scenarios like buffer overflows, where more data is written to a block of memory than it can hold, leading to corruption of adjacent memory. In the context of SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems, which are crucial for industrial control processes, a memory corruption issue can have severe implications. If an attacker exploits this vulnerability, they may disrupt the normal operation of the SCADA system, leading to failures or crashes that could have significant operational or safety impacts. The other options represent different types of vulnerabilities that are not typically associated with crashing software systems in the same manner. Code injection involves inserting malicious code into a program to manipulate its behavior, SQL injection targets databases through unvalidated inputs to execute unauthorized commands, and cross-site scripting is a vulnerability that allows attackers to inject scripts into web pages viewed by users. While all these types of vulnerabilities are serious and can have damaging effects, they do not correspond directly to the act of crashing a software application through memory misuse like memory corruption does.