For example, the Ping of Death exploit crashed machines by sending illegally fragmented packets at a victim. In viruses and trojans, the dropper is the part of the program that installs the hostile code onto the system. A way of breaking into a system. An exploit takes advantage of a weakness in a system in order to hack it. Exploits are the root of the hacker culture.
Hackers gain fame by discovering an exploit.
Others gain fame by writing scripts for it. Legions of script-kiddies apply the exploit to millions of systems, whether it makes sense or not. Any document explaining how to build or use explosives. It is hard for us to imagine any good use for explosives in the modern office. A program that runs in the background, recording all the keystrokes.