One last addition - I hope I'm not overstaying my welcome with all these little lectures on security. It used to be that a buffer overrun typically resulted from carelessness, like

   char name[100]; //Who has a name longer than 100 characters?
   printf(“What is your name?”);
   scanf(name, ”%s”);

It turns out that the same kind of people who have names like "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students; --" sometimes have 150-character names with a return address and a few bytes of malicious code. That's something that you handle kind of like you sanitize your inputs. You don't pour user input into a limited space. Scanf is deprecated now, and this kind of a vuln is becoming rare.

But as I explain a couple of comments down, a buffer overflow doesn't have to be this simple. You can get a bad pointer in a structure anywhere in your program, and when you use the structure, you will overwrite the stack. It's very hard to catch that kind of vuln - basically, it's a race with you (and white hats) vs. black hats. This is why I welcome the switch from C/C++ to managed code which is happening now, but very, very slowly.