An attacker, leveraging the ability to manipulate components of primary support systems and tools within the development and production environments, inserts malicious software within the hardware and/or firmware development environment. The infiltration purpose is to alter developed hardware components in a system destined for deployment at the victim's organization, for the purpose of disruption or further compromise.

An adversary attacks a target by providing input that causes an application to read beyond the boundary of a defined buffer. This typically occurs when a value influencing where to start or stop reading is set to reflect positions outside of the valid memory location of the buffer. This type of attack may result in exposure of sensitive information, a system crash, or arbitrary code execution.