Buffer overflows were certainly recognised considerably earlier than that. I remember a colleague pointing out buffer overflows in the first STL string implementations. It's not hard to go from that to SQL injection, or any other similar technique.
Certainly, my (possibly rose-coloured) memories of the time includes a lot of, "OMG. How stupid can people be? Surely they know better than that!"
I guess what I'm saying is that some people definitely knew what to do about this and were trying to do it. Most people were ignoring it and saying things like, "Oh, you're just being paranoid. Why would anyone try to do something like that?" It's a bit pointless to say, "What would have happened if people had listened" because the point was that people didn't listen. That was the whole problem.
The first modern overflow exploit was Thomas Lopatic's 1995 HPUX httpd exploit. When he wrote it up, he claimed it followed the blueprint of the "microscope and tweezers" paper Spafford wrote about the Morris worm. The Morris Worm, of course, was from 1988. In the years between 1988 and 1995 there were, so far as anyone knows, a total of zero code-exec buffer overflow exploits.
I was in the room with Peiter, at a DC Summercon, as he tried to work out the exploit for Sendmail 8.6.12 that 8lgm had teased. He definitely didn't have it before 8lgm, and 8lgm didn't have it before Lopatic. Even the virus guys didn't have it.
It's weird to think that nobody put two and two together in, say, 1991 --- there certainly was motivation (that's the timing of the Sun-Devil Raids!) and so much vulnerable software.
But then, in the late 1990s, people honestly thought they could mitigate overflows by moving buffers from the stack to the heap. Reliable heap exploits were a big deal as late as 2003, when Matt Conover spoke to a packed CanSec room about the Windows Heap, in excruciating detail for over an hour. That's close to a decade between Lopatic and mainstream heap exploitation on modern heaps.
It is possible that I am misremembering. I remember him submitting a bug and being ignored as a crank, though ;-). It may have been some other kind of memory corruption.
It's hard to believe that it's only been since the late 90's that buffer overruns exploits have been around. I will have to believe you as you have considerably more knowledge on the subject than me.
I'm very much wondering now about the times I used to boot trace games to crack them and if I ever used such a technique. It seems so obvious now that I may be assuming that I must have, but it's so long ago that I really can't remember. Certainly getting the loader to move your code around rather than theirs was a normal trick.
I'd say buffer overflows "went mainstream" roughly after November 1996 when Phrack 49 with "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" was released. At least I'd guess that's the most influencing article on the topic.
Certainly, my (possibly rose-coloured) memories of the time includes a lot of, "OMG. How stupid can people be? Surely they know better than that!"
I guess what I'm saying is that some people definitely knew what to do about this and were trying to do it. Most people were ignoring it and saying things like, "Oh, you're just being paranoid. Why would anyone try to do something like that?" It's a bit pointless to say, "What would have happened if people had listened" because the point was that people didn't listen. That was the whole problem.