I don't get what all the fuss is about - anyone remember the ZX81? had 1K of ram and had games like defender on it? Why is everyone going overboard on how this 12K is so neat to be a compromise. Remember the BBC Micro - it's Operating System fit on an 8K rom. The Basic Interpreter fit inside an 8K rom. A spreadsheet application fit inside 8K.

12K of compromise code seems to be bloated in itself - there is shellcode knocking around that's less than 1K, and since thats the only thing delivered within a buffer overflow - could this not be regarded as the smallest amount of code required to exploit a machine?

The 12K code, does however contain replication code, and an SMTP engine. But even so...

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