Certain example embodiments described herein relate to techniques for automatically protecting, or hardening, software against exploits of memory-corruption vulnerabilities. The techniques include arranging a plurality of guard regions in the memory in relation to data objects formed by the application program, identifying an access by the application program to a guard region arranged in the memory as a disallowed access, and modifying the execution of the application program in response to the identifying, the modifying being in order to prevent exploitation of the memory and/or to correctly execute the application program.