what do “hackers” mean by finding a “vulnerability”. It’s hard to understand how there can be a gap in code that grants that much access.

Question

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**Thank you guys for all the great answers I am enlightened. Computers are fascinating to me so this is a real treat!

In: 1007

Answer 1

Imagine a bug or an exploit in your favourite videogame – it wasn’t put there intentionally, and the game designers tried their hardest to code the game perfectly according to their vision. But there are always going to be a few bugs that fall under the radar, because modern videogames are huge and coded by hundreds of different people.

Look at the [early Pokemon games](https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_glitches_(Generation_I)) – the memory used by them was strictly controlled and used as efficiently as possible, but there were mistakes in the code that allowed certain player actions to store things in memory that corrupted it in ways that the devs didn’t account for.

From there, you can exploit it to modify game data to create all kinds of crazy glitch Pokemon that weren’t in the game originally, or give yourself items that you shouldn’t have access to, and more besides. For someone who’s studied how those games work, they can use that knowledge to get specific effects out of it – like obtaining a Mew despite it only officially being handed out at licensed in-person events.