The study looks into application-level attacks. An application-layer attack targets computers by deliberately causing a fault in a computer’s operating system or applications. This results in the attacker gaining the ability to bypass normal access controls. The attacker takes advantage of this situation, gaining control of an application, system or network. Application-level attacks can be performed either on a server or a client computer. The key difference from other types of attacks, such as network traffic eavesdropping/ tampering, is the ability of the attacker to be active (up to having total control over the compromised machine), rather than passively looking at the network traffic that happens to occur at any given time.