My understanding is that it was reversed from that, where with stack canaries and debug tracing nothing odd was happening, but when things are run without defen

My understanding is that it was reversed from that, where with stack canaries and debug tracing nothing odd was happening, but when things are run without defenses it _stops_ working, instead of starting to work because you're paying less attention. That was why it was so odd -- obviously the array overrunning (or passing (void*) &local_var into subroutines where it's cast to a different type, etc) would be a pretty obvious candidate.