Hack Your Way to Success: 2025 Ethical Hacking Essentials Challenge – Level Up Your Skills!

The correct answer is code injection, which refers to a technique where an attacker inserts malicious code into an application, allowing them to execute unauthorized commands. This manipulation typically takes advantage of vulnerabilities in the input validation processes of applications. When an application does not properly sanitize user inputs, it becomes susceptible to this type of attack, enabling the attacker to control how the application behaves.

Code injection can occur in various contexts, such as SQL injection for databases, where an attacker inserts SQL commands through a web form to manipulate the database. This method can lead to unauthorized data access, modification, or even complete system compromise.

Although other options like heap overflow and buffer overflow are also types of vulnerabilities that could lead to similar issues, they primarily exploit memory management flaws rather than directly manipulating the application's command execution. Session hijacking, on the other hand, focuses on taking control of a user's session rather than injecting code into the application itself. This highlights the unique nature of code injection as a method of directly altering application commands.