During an investigation, analysts find that several payroll records now show inflated salary amounts. Forensics reveals the attacker exploited a buffer overflow in the payroll application to overwrite adjacent memory where the salary values were stored. Which security objective of the CIA triad was primarily violated by this attack?
A buffer overflow writes beyond the allocated buffer, which can overwrite or alter nearby data structures. In this scenario the attacker changed stored salary values, so the accuracy and trustworthiness of the data were lost-an integrity violation. Confidentiality relates to unauthorized disclosure, availability to service uptime, and non-repudiation to proving who performed an action; none of those is the primary issue here.
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