exploited

adjective

ex·​ploit·​ed ik-ˈsplȯi-təd 

ˈek-ˌsplȯi-

: used for someone's advantage

an exploited resource

Pescatarians … are forgetting the fact that fish are the most exploited species on our planet.

—NationalPost.com

When a system becomes victim to an exploited vulnerability or an intruder, its behavior often changes.

—David Hamm

especially, of a person : unfairly or meanly used for another's advantage

He dedicated his life to improving the wages and working conditions of one of the nation's poorest and most exploited groups of workers …

—James C. Harrington

Examples of exploited in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The fort, which was an economic center for the earliest European colonizers in California, was built and supported by the exploited labor of Native people from the region, according to the park’s website. —Emma Hall, Sacramento Bee, 21 June 2024

Recent exploited vulnerabilities include the critical Windows vulnerabilities known as ZeroLogon (CVE-2020-1472), NoPac (CVE-2021-42278 and CVE-2021-42287), and PrintNightmare, as well as CVE-2024-1709 in the ScreenConnect application made by ConnectWise. —Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, 13 May 2024

An exploited worker at an Arkansas chicken plant strikes back with a kidnapping, which leads to other brutal events in Edgar winner Cranor's crime thriller. —Jim Higgins, Journal Sentinel, 15 May 2024

The exploited issue is a server-side request forgery bug in the SAML component tracked as CVE-2024-21893. —Kate O'Flaherty, WIRED, 29 Feb. 2024

These include patches for exploited flaws in Ivanti products, as well as fixes for vulnerabilities in SAP and Cisco software. —Kate O'Flaherty, WIRED, 31 Aug. 2023

For some industries — garment factories and car washes, for example — the state set up special enforcement programs and created funds to compensate exploited workers, but this has not been done for cannabis or agriculture in general. —Los Angeles Times, 29 Jan. 2023

Banner, who includes herself and her research process in the text, seeks to truly probe the paradoxes of who Marilyn was — her ability to be both a celebrity utterly in control of her image and a vulnerable, exploited figure. —Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 27 Sep. 2022

Sims’s most exploited subject, Anarcha Westcott, appears in my narrative as Arelia. —Daniel Drake, The New York Review of Books, 19 Feb. 2022

Word History

Etymology

from past participle of exploit entry 2

First Known Use

1867, in the meaning defined above