Errors Leading to Information

Stack Traces and Error Messages
Name
Institutional Affiliation

Stack Trace
Stack trace refers to a report that generates information regarding the operations of a program. It is usually applied in debugging as it helps programmers in identifying existing issues within a program and how various subroutines operate when a program is running (Schröter, Bettenburg and Premraj, 2010). Stack trace identifies different subroutines and examines how they run. They also help software developers in identifying bugs and isolate sections of software that contain glitches.
Errors Messages in Hacking
Hackers obtain valuable information through error messages displayed on sensitive information such as user details, their environment and associated data (Billig, Danilchenko and Frank, 2008). The information obtained could be utilized to launch sensitive information or could be valuable on its own such as passwords. This could be associated with more deadly attacks. If an attack fails, the hacker could utilize the erroneous data from the server to execute a more focused attack. There is a wide range of conditions that could result in the generation of errors from network timeouts, database unavailability, system call failure, null pointer exceptions or even out of memory.
It is recommendable for systems and software developer to adhere to proper handling of errors. The most prevalent issues of hacker attack usually arise when internal error feedback from the system is displayed to the attacker.

Such message includes error codes, database dumps and stack traces. Hackers depend on such information to understand the implementation details of the systems that ought to remain unrevealed therefore gaining critical clues on the flaws existing within a system, website or software. Moreover, even under instances where less information is displayed on the errors messages, important clues could be generated on how a system operates and the data available. It is essential to ensure that errors are handled strategically in ways that do not generate meaningful information to unauthorized parties.

References
Billig, J., Danilchenko, Y., & Frank, C. E. (2008, September). Evaluation of Google hacking. In Proceedings of the 5th annual conference on Information security curriculum development (pp. 27-32). ACM.
Schröter, A., Bettenburg, N., & Premraj, R. (2010). Do stack traces help developers fix bugs?.