By attacking a very small buffer with a very small set of shellcode, an attacker can potentially gain root access. It has been reported that in some cases the only effect is the segfault of the ntpd. Linux-Mandrake users are urged to upgrade ntp and xntp3 immediately. The NTP time synchronisation service shipped with NetBSD and many other systems is vulnerable to a buffer-overflow attack. This vulnerability may lead to arbitrary code execution as the user running the NTP daemon, usually root.
Systems running ftpd are vulnerable.
Mailx is installed setgid mail on Progeny and Debian systems. A buffer overflow in mailx allows for a local user to gain access to the mail group, which would allow that user to read and write to other mail spools. If the child process is setuid, the attacker can cause the child process to execute arbitrary code at an elevated privilege. The buffer overflow occurs when building a response to a query with a large readvar argument. The shellcode executed must be less than 70 bytes, otherwise the destination buffer is damaged.