High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! An exploit (from the same word in the French language, meaning "achievement", or "accomplishment") is a piece of software, a chunk of data, or sequence of commands that take advantage of a bug, glitch or vulnerability in order to cause unintended or unanticipated behavior to occur on computer software, hardware, or something electronic (usually computerised). This frequently includes such things as violently gaining control of a computer system or allowing privilege escalation or a denial of service attack.