Is Stack Exploitation still relevant in 2026, or has Heap taken over modern binary exploitation? With modern exploit mitigations becoming more common such as ASLR, NX, PIE, and stack canaries, classic stack-based exploitation seems less straightforward than it used to be. In older systems, simple buffer overflows often led to direct control of execution flow, but in modern environments exploitation usually requires additional steps like information leaks to bypass ASLR, ROP chains to bypass NX, and more complex memory corruption techniques. At the same time, heap exploitation techniques such as use-after-free, tcache poisoning, and double free seem to be more prevalent in modern real-world vulnerabilities and CTF challenges. This raises a discussion. Has stack exploitation lost its dominance in modern binary exploitation, or is it still just as relevant but simply harder to find and exploit in real-world scenarios? Do you think heap exploitation has become the primary attack surface now?…