As defenses to exploits have become more sophisticated, so have the attacks required to circumvent them. A historical perspective will be presented, elaborating on the techniques used and the real reason why they were developed. Modern exploit technique has its roots in solving problems for the attacker, resulting in advanced exploits for the following categories of flaw: Stack Overflows, Heap Overflows, Cross-Site Scripting, SQL Injection, and Path Manipulations. Learn about the roots of techniques like Stack cookies/Stackguard/Run-Time Stack Checking, DEP and ASLR, from attacks like trampolining, return-oriented programming, the evolution of fuzzing techniques, static and dynamic analysis for both attacking software.