1. A technique of breaking into a system, or a tool that implements the technique. An exploit takes advantage of a weakness/vulnerability in a system in order to hack it. Culture: Exploits are the key to hacker subculture. Hackers gain fame by discovering exploits. Others gain fame by writing scripts for them. Legions of script-kiddies apply the exploit to millions of systems, defacing webpages and gaining (in)fame. Controversy: There is no good definition for this word. It is debated a lot trying to define exactly what is, and is not, an exploit. Key point: Since people make the same mistakes over-and-over, exploits for very different systems start to look very much like each other. Most exploits can be classified under major categories: buffer overflow, backtracking, defaults, samples, Denial of Service Contrast: The words exploit and vulnerability are often used interchangeably. This is because the person who discovers a new vulnerability will usually write an exploit script for it at the same time. Therefore, the vulnerability is often known by the name of the exploit scriptl. From Hacking-Lexicon