The first modern overflow exploit was Thomas Lopatic's 1995 HPUX httpd exploit. When he wrote it up, he claimed it followed the blueprint of the "microscope and tweezers" paper Spafford wrote about the Morris worm. The Morris Worm, of course, was from 1988. In the years between 1988 and 1995 there were, so far as anyone knows, a total of zero code-exec buffer overflow exploits.

I was in the room with Peiter, at a DC Summercon, as he tried to work out the exploit for Sendmail 8.6.12 that 8lgm had teased. He definitely didn't have it before 8lgm, and 8lgm didn't have it before Lopatic. Even the virus guys didn't have it.

It's weird to think that nobody put two and two together in, say, 1991 --- there certainly was motivation (that's the timing of the Sun-Devil Raids!) and so much vulnerable software.

But then, in the late 1990s, people honestly thought they could mitigate overflows by moving buffers from the stack to the heap. Reliable heap exploits were a big deal as late as 2003, when Matt Conover spoke to a packed CanSec room about the Windows Heap, in excruciating detail for over an hour. That's close to a decade between Lopatic and mainstream heap exploitation on modern heaps.

>shrug<

I'd say buffer overflows "went mainstream" roughly after November 1996 when Phrack 49 with "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" was released. At least I'd guess that's the most influencing article on the topic.