A system administrator is troubleshooting a possible denial of service on a sensitive system. The system seems to run properly for a few hours after it is restarted, but then it suddenly stops…

The process log shows memory growing continuously from 20K to 8.0G across several hours without ever being released - the hallmark of a memory leak where objects are allocated but never reclaimed. This pattern is directly caused by improper or intentionally disabled garbage collection, which prevents the runtime from freeing unused memory. A disgruntled developer could deliberately introduce this condition to exhaust system resources and eventually crash the service.

Integer overflow produces incorrect arithmetic results or crashes at the point of a specific calculation, not a pattern of continuous memory growth visible over hours of runtime.

Input validation failures typically manifest as injection attacks or data corruption errors at the point of input, not as steadily increasing memory consumption across time.

Buffer overflow attacks corrupt memory or crash a process at the moment of the overflow event, not as a gradual, sustained increase in allocated memory shown in the log.