Its not that serious because it only effects snort when the verbose flag is set. So most people using it as an IDS would just daemonize it and not also use the -v flag. In IDS it actually does detect a malformedpacket. When the -v flag is on it tries to display information about the packet that doesnt exist. I know exactly where in the code it does this and I have made POC code that can segfault it on a number of different packets. So its really not that serious but out of my own curiosity I wanted to see if it was possible to exploit this(since it would still be cool to get a root shell if some was running ./snort -v).

From my knowledge there is no way yo exploit it. Theres basically a buffer that is null and it is displayed to output. But i talked to someone else and he said an OS like Link OS (not sure about spelling) and a few others would be vulnerable. So I would assume this means that have a different style of run time stack or that variables get certain address's or ...... well really thats why I asked because while I dont think its possible and other peo[le are telling me it is and I was just curious how and why.