1. In the security community, the word "vulnerability" describes a problem (such as a programming bug or common misconfiguration) that allows a system to be attacked or broken into. Culture: Finding vulnerabilities is a big part of the hacker/infosec culture. Finding vulnerabilities is way of proving that you are "elite". This subculture is similar to the scientific community. For example, there are a number of people (usually commercial companies) that are "research whores": they take existing research and add their own small contribution, but then publish the result in such a way that leads people to believe that they are responsible for all the research leading up to that discovery. Contrast: The words exploit and vulnerability are tightly bound together. Often, an script/program will exploit a specific vulnerability. Since most vulnerabilities are exploited by script kiddies, the vulnerability is often known by the name of the most popular script that exploits it. Key point: There exist broad-spectrum vulnerability scanners/assessment-tools that will scan a system looking for common vulnerabilities. These are often used in order to harden a system. See also: risk From Hacking-Lexicon