As with buffer overflows there are primarily three ways to protect against heap overflows.

Heap overflows are exploitable in a different manner to that of stack-based overflows.

A heap overflow is a type of buffer overflow that occurs in the heap data area.

Microsoft's GDI+ vulnerability in handling JPEGs is an example of the danger a heap overflow can present.

The Microsoft JPEG GDI+ vulnerability MS04-028 is an example of the danger a heap overflow can represent to a computer user.

It detects memory-related programming errors such as accesses of uninitialized memory, accesses to freed memory, heap overflow and underflow, and memory leaks.

The canonical heap overflow technique overwrites dynamic memory allocation linkage (such as malloc meta data) and uses the resulting pointer exchange to overwrite a program function pointer.

A buffer overflow occurring in the heap data area is referred to as a heap overflow and is exploitable in a manner different from that of stack-based overflows.