Email security is filled with complex acronyms and rapidly evolving threats. From technical protocols like DMARC and SPF to sophisticated attacks like Business Email Compromise (BEC), understanding the terminology is the first step in defense.
We created this glossary to decode the language of cybersecurity. Use the search bar below to find a specific term, or browse by category to explore the tools, tactics, and protocols that keep organizations safe.
Account takeover fraud, or account compromise, is a malicious activity where an unauthorized cyber attacker obtains legitimate user credentials to gain control of and exploit a valid account for fraudulent purposes.
Microsoft's centralized directory service acting as a critical identity and access management (IAM) database within Windows domain networks. For cybersecurity professionals, it defines and stores formal definitions of all network objects (users, computers, groups) and their attributes via the schema, enabling centralized authentication (Kerberos) and authorization for resources, making its security and integrity paramount to the overall enterprise security posture.
A sophisticated, multi-stage cyber-espionage campaign where highly skilled threat actors establish covert, long-term unauthorized access within a target network. Unlike common malware, APTs are often orchestrated by well-funded groups (like nation-states) with specific objectives, such as stealing intellectual property or monitoring communications. These attacks frequently begin with a targeted spear-phishing email to gain an initial foothold, after which the attacker moves slowly and carefully to avoid detection by traditional security monitoring tools.
Integrated security solutions designed to proactively identify, block, and mitigate sophisticated and polymorphic cyber-attacks. This includes zero-day exploits, advanced persistent threats (APTs), and evolving malware that evade conventional perimeter defenses.
Software that automatically displays unwanted advertisements.
Autonomous systems capable of sophisticated planning, independent decision-making, and executing multi-step tasks with minimal human oversight to achieve complex goals. For cybersecurity, these goal-oriented agents introduce unique risks requiring new security frameworks, governance, and real-time defense mechanisms.
Exponentially accelerated and scaled adversarial operations leveraging AI, ML, or LLMs to automate reconnaissance, exploitation, and polymorphic malware generation. These tools collapse attack timelines from weeks to minutes and demand AI-driven defensive capabilities.
The strategic framework, policies, and processes implemented to ensure the ethical, compliant, and secure development and deployment of AI systems. It focuses on risk mitigation, bias monitoring, data protection, transparency, and establishing clear accountability for AI-driven decisions within the enterprise.
The leverage of advanced machine learning algorithms and computational models to autonomously analyze vast datasets, rapidly identify sophisticated digital threats, and implement automated countermeasures, thereby enhancing detection, prevention, and response capabilities at scale.
The use of sophisticated artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to autonomously identify and analyze emerging cyber threats. It operates continuously to scale security event processing and threat hunting capabilities beyond human capacity for enhanced security posture.
Artificial Intelligence Trust, Risk, and Security Management. A critical governance framework (coined by Gartner) that comprehensively addresses the imperative for AI models to exhibit high standards in trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, robustness, and efficacy, while ensuring stringent data protection controls.
Also known as notification fatigue, this is the desensitization and diminished responsiveness experienced by cybersecurity professionals due to an overwhelming volume of alerts and alarms. This often leads to missed critical threats, delayed incident response, and a compromised security posture.
An advanced method integrating directly with email platforms (e.g., Microsoft 365, Google Workspace) via APIs for real-time, continuous threat monitoring. This solution uses machine learning to detect phishing, malware, and BEC, offering automated responses (like retraction of malicious emails) and facilitating post-attack forensics.
A protocol that allows intermediate servers (like mailing lists) to "sign off" on original authentication results so the final recipient knows the email was valid at the start. Note: Watch for "Authentication-Results" headers that show arc=fail, which often indicates the email was tampered with by a malicious middleman.
In cybersecurity, this refers to the deployment of machine learning and autonomous systems to automate, scale, and enhance threat detection, incident response, vulnerability management, and predictive analytics. It also represents an escalating risk landscape due to AI-driven, faster, and more sophisticated attacks by threat actors.
The aggregate sum of all potential vectors—hardware, software, network configurations, human factors, and operational processes—that unauthorized threat actors could exploit to breach security controls, compromise assets, or gain access to sensitive organizational data.
The specific path or method an attacker uses to gain unauthorized access to a computer system or network. Email is considered the single most targeted attack vector globally, often used to deliver malicious attachments, phishing links, and social engineering lures.
A method to verify that a user is who they claim to be, preventing unauthorized access.
Note: While labeled AWS DLP in the source, the definition describes AWS Security.The critical strategy and implementation of controls—including encryption, access management (IAM), network firewalls, and logging/monitoring (CloudTrail/Config)—required to protect corporate data stored in shared cloud infrastructure from unauthorized access, loss, and corruption, and to maintain regulatory compliance.
A hidden method for bypassing normal authentication in a computer system to gain unauthorized access.
A 2017 strain of disk-encrypting ransomware (likely a Petya variant) that spread laterally across corporate networks using exploits like EternalRomance.
A social engineering attack that exploits curiosity or greed, such as leaving a malware-infected USB drive in a public place hoping a victim will plug it in.
A technique where attackers split a malicious URL into multiple Base64-encoded chunks to bypass keyword scanners in email filters.
Authentication based on unique biological characteristics (fingerprints, iris scans, voice) or behavioral patterns (keystroke dynamics).
A network of compromised devices ("bots") controlled remotely by an attacker via Command and Control (C2) infrastructure to execute coordinated attacks like DDoS or spam campaigns.
A Zero Trust model that executes web content on remote servers or in virtual sandboxes, insulating local endpoints from web-based threats like drive-by downloads.
Attacks that attempt to gain access by systematically guessing passwords or using automated tools to inject lists of stolen credentials (stuffing) into login pages.
A specific type of spear-phishing where attackers impersonate trusted executives or vendors to trick employees into authorizing wire transfers or revealing sensitive data.
A policy enforcement point placed between cloud consumers and providers. It provides visibility into "Shadow IT," enforces data loss prevention (DLP), and ensures compliance across cloud services.
Catfishing involves creating a completely fake online identity to deceive a victim, often to trick them into a relationship for the purpose of fraud. While frequently seen on social media, catfishing is also used in business contexts for corporate espionage or financial theft. An attacker might spend weeks building a rapport with an employee under a false persona before asking for sensitive information, wire transfers, or for the victim to open a malicious file. This exploit relies on emotional manipulation rather than technical hacking.
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is a landmark privacy law mandating covered businesses to implement reasonable security measures, ensure transparency regarding data collection, and protect consumer rights including the right to know, delete, opt-out of sale/sharing, and limit the use of sensitive personal information.
Fraud CEO fraud is a specific type of spear phishing attack where a threat actor impersonates a high-level corporate executive, often the Chief Executive Officer, to deceive an employee into performing unauthorized actions, typically wire transfers or releasing sensitive data.
Cerber Ransomware Cerber is a prolific Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) malware, first discovered in March 2016, targeting Windows OS. It is typically distributed via phishing emails utilizing malicious macros or Windows Script Files, encrypting over 400 file types using algorithms like RC4, RSA, and AES-256. Later versions incorporated botnet functionality to execute distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is an executive responsible for establishing and maintaining the enterprise's vision, strategy, and program to ensure information assets and technologies are adequately protected. This role encompasses developing cybersecurity strategies, managing risk, and strengthening cyber-defenses across the organization.
Clone phishing is a deceptive attack where an intruder takes a legitimate email that a victim has previously received and copies it almost exactly. The attacker then replaces a safe link or attachment from the original email with a malicious version and resends it from a spoofed address. Because the email looks identical to a trusted communication the user has seen before, they are much more likely to click the malicious link without suspicion, making this an extremely effective way to deliver malware or steal credentials.
Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a critical security measure utilizing policies and technologies to detect, monitor, and protect sensitive data stored or transiting within cloud environments, mitigating risks from accidental exposure, malicious insider threats, and sophisticated external cyberattacks.
Cloud computing, encompassing the shift to cloud environments and a mobile workforce, inherently introduces new security and compliance risks. Cybersecurity professionals must address these by implementing robust policies, controls, and technologies, focusing on risks like data breaches, misconfigurations, shadow IT, compliance challenges (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA), and insider threats across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is a critical security discipline for continuously monitoring and assessing cloud environments—including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS—to automatically detect, evaluate in context, and remediate misconfigurations, compliance violations, and security risks, proactively reducing the attack surface.
The server an attacker uses to send instructions to compromised computers.
An account compromise occurs when unauthorized threat actors successfully obtain valid credentials or access mechanisms, typically via phishing or social engineering, enabling them to execute malicious or unauthorized operations, thereby circumventing established security controls and exploiting the trusted user context.
A computer virus is a malicious software payload or authored code segment that necessitates a host program for activation, possesses the capability for self-replication, and is designed to propagate across systems, corrupting data and compromising the integrity of the computing environment.
Credential compromise is defined as the unauthorized acquisition of legitimate login details, such as usernames and passwords, enabling impersonation of authorized users and subsequent illicit access to systems and sensitive data, often leading to data exfiltration or financial malfeasance.
A cyber-attack where an actor obtains a user's identity to attempt unauthorized access.
Credential stuffing is an automated cyberattack where adversaries use large lists of previously stolen or compromised username and password combinations to attempt unauthorized access across multiple online services, exploiting the common practice of password reuse.
Credential theft involves the unauthorized capture of sensitive authentication secrets, such as usernames, passwords, session tokens, or private keys, from individuals or automated systems, posing a significant risk to network security and data integrity for organizations.
Critical infrastructure, vital for national security and economic stability, comprises essential physical and virtual systems (e.g., energy, transportation, IT) whose incapacitation by threats like cyberattacks or equipment failure would have a debilitating impact; securing these complex, often converged environments requires specialized, proactive cybersecurity strategies and compliance with standards like those from CISA and NIST.
Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a prevalent web application vulnerability where threat actors bypass security controls to inject client-side scripts, often JavaScript, into trusted web pages. This malicious code executes in the victim's browser, allowing attackers to steal session cookies, hijack user sessions, or redirect users.
Cryptojacking, or malicious cryptomining, is a cyber threat where an attacker secretly hijacks a victim's computing resources (processing power and electricity) via malware or browser-based scripts to mine cryptocurrency without consent, resulting in decreased system performance, overheating, and increased costs.
CryptoLocker is a sophisticated variant of ransomware that employs strong encryption algorithms to restrict unauthorized access to a victim's files and operating system, demanding a payment, or ransom, typically in cryptocurrency, for the decryption key necessary to restore data access and system functionality.
CryptoWall is sophisticated ransomware that typically propagates through malvertising and phishing, utilizing advanced encryption algorithms like RSA-2048 to lock files across network shares, demanding Bitcoin ransom for the private decryption key, thus disrupting organizational operations.
A cyber-attack is a calculated, hostile operation targeting digital assets, infrastructure, or network components, leveraging vulnerabilities to compromise system integrity, confidentiality, or availability, resulting in unauthorized access, data theft, disruption of services, or destruction of resources.
Cyber crime encompasses any criminal activity leveraging digital devices, computer systems, or networks, motivated primarily by financial gain or sometimes political objectives. It includes sophisticated attacks like malware, ransomware, and cyber espionage, as well as fraud schemes, identity theft, and unauthorized data breaches, requiring specialized expertise to prevent, detect, and mitigate.
Cyber espionage is the covert and illicit utilization of digital methodologies and advanced persistent threats (APTs) by state and non-state actors to infiltrate secure networks, exfiltrate intellectual property, sensitive data, and classified governmental or corporate intelligence without authorization, fundamentally compromising information security.
Cyber extortion is a sophisticated form of cybercrime involving threat actors compromising digital security infrastructure through exploitation of vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access, subsequently leveraging the threat of data exposure, system downtime, or denial-of-service attacks to demand a ransom payment from the victim organization.
Cyber hygiene, or cybersecurity hygiene, encompasses the essential, routine practices and policies implemented by organizations and security personnel to proactively manage vulnerabilities, ensuring continuous resilience, operational integrity, and robust security posture across all critical systems, networks, devices, and sensitive data assets.
Cyber insurance, or cyber-liability insurance, is a risk management mechanism designed to mitigate the financial repercussions of cybersecurity incidents, including but not limited to, data breaches, network compromises, and ransomware attacks, thereby protecting organizational financial stability.
The Cyber Kill Chain, developed by Lockheed Martin, is an Intelligence Driven Defense model that identifies the seven critical stages—Reconnaissance, Weaponization, Delivery, Exploitation, Installation, Command and Control, and Actions on Objectives—an adversary must complete to achieve objectives like data exfiltration or system compromise.
A cyber threat is any malicious circumstance or event, internal or external, with the potential to adversely impact organizational operations by targeting data, systems, or networks. It often involves a cyber attacker seeking unauthorized access or exploiting vulnerabilities to compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of information resources.
Cybersecurity, for professionals, encompasses the comprehensive deployment of technologies, processes, and controls designed to protect information systems, networks, programs, and data from advanced digital threats, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability against unauthorized access, attack, or damage.
Cybersecurity analytics is the application of data analysis, machine learning, and behavioral analytics to monitor networks, correlate insights across security tools, detect threats, analyze traffic, and facilitate improved, proactive incident response and forensic investigations, providing a unified view of enterprise network activity.
Cybersecurity compliance is the mandated adherence to established laws, regulations, standards, and frameworks (like ISO 27001 or NIST CSF) designed to protect an organization's sensitive data and information systems. It functions as a critical risk management tool, reinforcing legal and ethical accountability while ensuring robust security controls to mitigate cyber threats, maintain customer trust, and avoid significant financial and legal penalties.
Cybersecurity litigation is the legal action initiated after a significant data breach, typically involving customer-victims of identity theft or projected financial losses who file lawsuits seeking appropriate compensation and restitution from the compromised organization.
The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) is a mandated, tiered Department of Defense (DoD) program establishing required cybersecurity standards for contractors within the defense industrial base (DIB), focusing on protecting Federal Contract Information (FCI) and Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) across the supply chain against evolving cyber threats.
A security protocol that uses DNSSEC to bind TLS certificates to domain names, preventing an attacker from using a fake cert to intercept mail. Watch out for: TLS connection errors in your mail logs that indicate a "Certificate Mismatch," a sign of a potential Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) interception.
The dark web is the intentionally hidden, encrypted segment of the deep web, inaccessible via standard browsers, often utilizing networks like Tor. While notoriously associated with illegal activities such as illicit trade and stolen data exchange, it also provides critical infrastructure for secure, anonymous communication, crucial for whistleblowers, journalists, and defending against censorship and surveillance.
Secure data archiving is the comprehensive process of systematically migrating and storing infrequently accessed, non-volatile data assets to a highly secure, immutable, and cost-effective secondary repository, ensuring long-term data integrity, regulatory compliance, and availability for forensic investigation and advanced data analytics while maintaining robust encryption and access controls.
A data breach is a security incident involving unauthorized access, exfiltration, or misuse of sensitive, confidential, or protected data, frequently resulting from vulnerabilities, hacker attacks, phishing, or insider threats, leading to significant financial, reputational, and legal consequences.
A data center is a centralized, specialized facility housing a vast array of IT infrastructure, including servers, networking equipment, and storage, designed for managing and processing critical data, requiring robust physical and cyber defenses to maintain availability, integrity, and confidentiality against threats.
Data center security encompasses the comprehensive physical and virtual cybersecurity measures implemented to safeguard corporate data and infrastructure housed within third-party data center locations, ensuring protection against unauthorized access and malicious attackers.
Data classification is the process of organizing and categorizing structured and unstructured data based on its sensitivity, importance, and predefined criteria, enabling organizations to efficiently manage, protect, and handle data assets by assigning appropriate classification levels for enhanced security and compliance.
Data exfiltration is the illicit, unauthorized transfer, copying, or retrieval of sensitive or proprietary data assets from a secure perimeter, server, or individual endpoint device, often constituting a significant security breach and intellectual property theft.
Data governance is the essential, holistic framework encompassing security strategies, established policies, and defined rules to rigorously manage and enforce the continuous security, comprehensive availability, verifiable integrity, and regulatory compliance of all organizational enterprise data assets.
Data labeling, or data tagging, is the critical process of annotating raw data points with informative labels to create "ground truth" datasets. This enables machine learning algorithms, crucial for applications like threat detection and natural language processing, to accurately interpret data and make reliable predictions, significantly enhancing the effectiveness of security models.
A data leak is the accidental, non-malicious disclosure or exposure of sensitive, proprietary, or confidential data—such as credentials, intellectual property, or customer records—due to human error, system errors, or infrastructure misconfigurations, making the information accessible outside its authorized environment.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is an essential cybersecurity strategy utilizing a suite of integrated technologies, policies, and procedural controls to identify, monitor, and prevent the unauthorized movement, access, sharing, or transmission of sensitive and regulated organizational data assets, ensuring compliance and mitigating risk.
Data masking is a critical cybersecurity technique, also known as data obfuscation or anonymization, used to create realistic yet non-sensitive versions of production data for use in non-production environments like development and testing, thereby protecting personally identifiable information (PII) from accidental exposure or theft through methods such as substitution, shuffling, and variance.
Cybersecurity professionals identify, monitor, and mitigate threats like data poisoning—a sophisticated cyber-attack that corrupts AI/ML training datasets—by implementing systems for threat detection, incident response, network security, and continuous vulnerability analysis to protect organizational systems and data integrity.
Data privacy, crucial for cybersecurity, involves establishing policies, procedures, and controls to govern the collection, use, retention, and disclosure of sensitive customer data, ensuring adherence to regulatory compliance and preventing unauthorized access or misuse by third parties.
Data security, or information protection, encompasses the comprehensive set of policies, infrastructure, and controls—including encryption, access management, and threat detection—applied across the data lifecycle to safeguard digital assets from corruption, theft, unauthorized access, and intentional or unintentional threats.
Data reconciliation is a critical cybersecurity practice involving the systematic comparison, verification, and harmonization of data sets across multiple systems to ensure integrity, consistency, and completeness. This process proactively identifies inconsistencies or anomalies that may signal security breaches, unauthorized access, or data manipulation, facilitating accurate compliance and incident response.
A data retention policy is a mandatory governance framework specifying the mandated duration, secure storage mechanisms, and formal procedures for archiving, overwriting, or permanently deleting backup data to ensure compliance with legal and regulatory cybersecurity requirements, supporting incident response and auditability.
Data security encompasses a rigorous framework of organizational practices, technological strategies, and defensive mitigation techniques essential for preserving the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive digital assets against unauthorized access, corruption, or malicious threats.
DSPM is an essential data-centric security approach for cybersecurity professionals, offering centralized visibility, continuous monitoring, and granular control over an organization's sensitive data assets across hybrid and multi-cloud environments to proactively mitigate risks and enforce compliance.
Data theft, in a cybersecurity context, constitutes the illicit extraction, copying, or acquisition of sensitive digital assets from an organization's systems or network, typically motivated by financial gain, espionage, or malicious intent to compromise operational integrity and confidentiality.
Data visualization, for cybersecurity professionals, is the critical process of transforming vast security datasets into visual formats—such as network graphs, heat maps, and dashboards—to quickly identify threat patterns, contextualize attacks, and enable real-time analysis for effective vulnerability management and informed security measures.
A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack constitutes a concerted, malicious effort utilizing multiple compromised computer systems to overwhelm a targeted network, server, or service infrastructure, thereby successfully disrupting the availability of normal traffic and legitimate user access.
Deepfakes constitute highly sophisticated synthetic media, generated through advanced AI and machine learning techniques, specifically generative adversarial networks (GANs), to convincingly fabricate or alter audio, video, or images, posing significant risks for targeted disinformation, fraud, and authentication bypass in digital environments.
Scheduling a malicious email to land in inboxes at 2:00 AM on a Saturday, when the SOC is at minimum staffing and response time is slower. Watch out for: Spikes in "high-risk" emails (invoices, password resets) arriving during non-business hours for the recipient's time zone.
An attack that prevents authorized users from accessing a network or device.
Digital forensics is the rigorous, systematic process of identifying, preserving, recovering, authenticating, and analyzing electronic data (ESI) from digital media, ensuring its admissibility as evidence in legal proceedings or for incident response and threat intelligence within a cybersecurity context.
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is an EU regulation establishing a holistic, end-to-end framework for managing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) risk in the financial sector. It mandates requirements for ICT risk management, digital operational resilience testing (like TLPT), ICT-related incident reporting, and oversight of critical ICT third-party service providers.
Digital Risk Management (DRM) is the strategic practice of identifying, assessing, and mitigating unwanted outcomes—including cybersecurity, third-party, and data privacy risks—stemming from digital technologies, platforms, and transformation initiatives, ensuring business objective continuity.
A digital signature is a cryptographic primitive utilizing asymmetric public key cryptography—involving hashing and encryption with a private key—to definitively assure the integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation of digital data for verification by any party possessing the corresponding public key.
Disaster recovery, for cybersecurity professionals, encompasses the strategic plans, technical capabilities, and established protocols necessary to restore critical IT infrastructure, applications, and data integrity following any significant disruption, ensuring business continuity and resilience against catastrophic events.
A larger version of a DoS attack where a group of attackers floods a server simultaneously.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an email authentication protocol that uses cryptographic signatures tied to a domain's DNS to allow receiving mail servers to verify message integrity and sender legitimacy, mitigating email spoofing and phishing attacks.
Injecting invisible "tags" or specific metadata into sensitive outgoing documents so they can be traced back to the sender if they are leaked via email. Watch out for: Files that trigger a "Sensitivity Label" warning in your Data Loss Prevention (DLP) system when they are attached to an external email.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is a powerful security rule that ties SPF and DKIM together. It provides instructions to the receiving mail server on what to do if an email fails authentication—such as doing nothing, quarantining it in the spam folder, or rejecting it entirely. DMARC also provides reporting back to the domain owner, giving them visibility into who is sending mail on their behalf and helping them spot and block unauthorized spoofing attempts across the internet.
Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system fundamental to internet navigation, translating human-readable domain names into numerical Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that devices use for identification and location. For cybersecurity professionals, its integrity is critical, as DNS attacks (spoofing, tunneling, amplification) are frequently exploited to redirect traffic, compromise data, or launch Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
DNS spoofing, often accomplished through cache poisoning, is a cyberattack where malicious actors alter DNS server entries to redirect users to a fraudulent website, often for phishing, malware delivery, or data theft, by providing an incorrect IP address translation for a domain name.
A domain serves as the main unique address for a website or email system, such as @yourcompany.com. It is the primary identifier for an organization’s digital presence and acts as the "anchor" for establishing trust with other mail servers. Managing a domain effectively requires maintaining its reputation and ensuring its DNS records are correctly configured to prevent spoofing. If a domain is compromised, attackers can send authenticated-looking emails that easily bypass traditional security filters, making it a high-value target for cybercriminals.
Domain spoofing is a sophisticated social engineering and cyber attack technique where malicious actors meticulously forge digital identities—such as email domains or websites—to impersonate reputable entities, thereby deceiving recipients and gaining unauthorized access or disseminating malware.
An attack where data is both encrypted and stolen, with threats to release it.
Doxing is a deliberate, malicious cyber-attack methodology where threat actors secretly gather, research, and publicly broadcast a victim's private, identifying information—such as physical address, employment data, or financial records—without consent, often leading to harassment or real-world harm.
A program designed to install malware (a virus) onto a target system.
The care a reasonable person takes before entering an agreement.
E-discovery is the systematic digital forensic process for identifying, preserving, collecting, processing, reviewing, and producing Electronically Stored Information (ESI) relevant to litigation or regulatory matters, focusing on maintaining the integrity and chain of custody of digital evidence.
An eavesdropping attack, also known as sniffing or snooping, is a malicious attempt to passively or actively intercept, access, and potentially modify or delete data transmitted over a network or communication channel without authorization. This sophisticated cyberattack includes methods like network sniffing, Adversary-in-the-Middle (AitM), and VoIP interception, posing significant data security and privacy risks.
Rights used to grant a user specific access to objects like files or folders.
Electronic communication, or digital communication, is the secure and verifiable transfer of sensitive information, including data, messages, knowledge, or ideas, across networks and digital platforms, requiring stringent confidentiality, integrity, and availability controls to mitigate risks and unauthorized access.
Email Account Compromise (EAC), also known as Business Email Compromise (BEC), is a sophisticated cyberattack where criminals gain unauthorized access to a legitimate email account to execute fraudulent requests. Attackers "be you" to bypass email authentication, targeting internal parties or external partners to facilitate financial or data loss.
Email archiving is a secure, indexed system for long-term preservation of digital communications, critical for regulatory compliance (e.g., HIPAA, FINRA), e-discovery, and maintaining data integrity. It provides a tamper-proof repository and independent backup, enhancing incident response and overall data lifecycle management.
Email authentication is a critical security layer utilizing protocols like Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) to cryptographically verify message origin, sender legitimacy, and integrity, mitigating spoofing and phishing threats.
Email deliverability, in the context of security, refers to the sophisticated technical process ensuring legitimate messages successfully bypass anti-spam filters, quarantine measures, and gateway security protocols to arrive in the intended recipient's primary mailbox, signifying effective sender authentication and reputation management.
Email encryption is a critical defensive process that employs cryptographic techniques to encode the contents and attachments of a message, ensuring confidentiality and integrity, thereby neutralizing the risk of unauthorized access, passive interception, and data exfiltration across insecure networks.
Email filtering, in a cybersecurity context, is the systematic, automated analysis and management of inbound and outbound electronic mail traffic, utilizing advanced algorithms and threat intelligence to apply policy controls, detect malware, spam, phishing attempts, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards and organizational security posture.
Email impersonation is a social engineering phishing vector where threat actors forge the sender's address to masquerade as a trusted entity (e.g., executive, vendor, or employee) to deceive recipients and facilitate fraudulent activities or credential theft.
Email protection is a critical cybersecurity discipline integrating advanced technical controls—such as gateway filtering, encryption, and authentication protocols—with comprehensive organizational training to mitigate email-borne threats, including phishing, malware, and sophisticated social engineering attacks targeting network infiltration and data compromise.
Email fraud is a broad category of deceptive cyber attacks executed via electronic mail, designed to maliciously acquire sensitive data, financial assets, or unauthorized system access, often employing sophisticated social engineering tactics targeting organizational security posture.
Email security encompasses a defensive architecture of layered technologies, established protocols, and governance policies systematically implemented to safeguard electronic mail systems and contents against sophisticated cyber threats, ensuring the persistent confidentiality, structural integrity, and assured availability of critical communication channels.
Email spoofing is a malicious act of impersonation where the sender manipulates email headers to make a message appear to originate from a trusted source or entity. This technique is routinely leveraged in phishing campaigns and spam distribution to deceive recipients, bypass security controls, and facilitate credential theft or malware delivery.
End user monitoring is a critical cybersecurity practice that continuously tracks real-time user interactions with web applications and IT services, collecting metrics from devices to analyze site performance, identify connection methods, detect errors, and log user behavior for comprehensive analytics and threat detection.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is a sophisticated cybersecurity framework that continuously monitors endpoint activity, utilizing advanced analytics and automation to proactively identify, investigate, contain, and remediate known and unknown threats, providing deeper visibility into the threat landscape.
The process of protecting devices like laptops and smartphones from cyber attacks.
Endpoint security is a comprehensive defense strategy involving integrated software, hardware, and policies to protect all end-user devices—like laptops, mobile devices, and IoT—connected to a network or cloud, offering advanced capabilities such as EDR, antimalware, and centralized management against zero-day threats and sophisticated cyberattacks to safeguard corporate assets.
Endpoint-delivered threats are vectors where malicious payloads breach a corporate network via compromised user assets, including infected personal or portable devices enabling lateral movement, or through social engineering tactics that manipulate users into installing rogue security or utility software.
Enterprise security is the comprehensive framework of technological, procedural, and policy-driven defenses implemented across an organization's infrastructure to protect assets, data, and systems from internal and external threats, ensuring business continuity and compliance with regulatory mandates.
Using math to measure the "randomness" of an email attachment; high entropy usually indicates that the file is encrypted or "packed" with a malicious payload. Watch out for: Attachments with an entropy score near 8.0, which indicates the file is likely a hidden executable or encrypted archive.
A tool or code used to take advantage of a security weakness in a system.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is a comprehensive, unified security operations platform that leverages advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to proactively detect, analyze, and automatically orchestrate responses to sophisticated cyber threats across disparate security layers, including endpoint, network, cloud, and email infrastructure, providing superior threat visibility and efficiency for security teams.
When a security tool fails to catch a real threat.
When a security tool mistakenly labels safe activity as malicious.
A technique where a phishing domain cycles through hundreds of different IP addresses every few minutes to evade IP-based blocking. Watch out for: A single phishing URL that resolves to a different global IP address every time your SOC analysts attempt to "ping" or scan it.
The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a mandatory, government-wide compliance framework establishing standardized security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring requirements for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) seeking to contract with U.S. federal agencies, ensuring adequate protection of sensitive government information hosted in the cloud.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) mandates stringent protection of student educational records and personally identifiable information (PII). It requires robust cybersecurity measures, including data encryption, access controls, incident response planning, and accountability for non-compliance, risking loss of federal funding.
Malware that exists only in the computer's memory (RAM), evading traditional antivirus.
A firewall is a critical network security apparatus deployed to monitor, filter, and control incoming and outgoing network traffic based on an established set of security policies, effectively creating a defensive perimeter against unauthorized access and malicious network threats.
Zeus is a sophisticated family of financial malware, first identified in 2005, primarily engineered for credential theft. An evolution includes GameOver Zeus, a highly advanced variant characterized by its decentralized peer-to-peer communication structure and the incorporation of a significant ransomware payload.
The GDPR is the EU regulation mandating stringent protection for personal data of EU citizens, requiring organizations globally to implement robust technical and organizational security measures, uphold data processing principles like purpose limitation, and guarantee comprehensive data subject rights, including the right to erasure and portability.
Generative AI (GenAI) is a class of AI systems capable of creating novel content, including code and synthetic data, which is transforming cybersecurity by enhancing threat detection, response, and defense strategies, while also presenting risks like adversarial attacks, data leakage, and sophisticated, adaptive malware development by threat actors.
In cybersecurity, graymail refers to high-volume, solicited email correspondence originating from legitimate sources that, while not classified as malicious spam, possesses subjective value across recipients, often contributing significantly to inbox clutter and potential data security concerns through reduced vigilance.
Greylisting is a specific spam defense mechanism that temporarily rejects email from unknown senders. When a new server tries to send an email, the greylisting system returns a "try again later" message. Legitimate mail servers are programmed to automatically retry the delivery after a short delay, at which point the email is accepted. However, because many spam bots are designed for speed and do not bother to retry, greylisting effectively filters out a large volume of automated junk mail before it enters the inbox.
Hacking, in a professional cybersecurity context, involves the deliberate act of circumventing security protocols and exploiting systemic vulnerabilities within computer networks, applications, or infrastructure to illicitly compromise systems, achieve unauthorized access, escalate privileges, or exert control over digital assets.
Hacktivism is the use of computer technology and hacking methods, such as Denial-of-Service attacks or website defacement, by political or social activists to achieve an ideological agenda or make a public statement against entities they perceive as unethical, oppressive, or harmful, often during geopolitical unrest.
HIPAA compliance, under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, mandates rigorous implementation of physical, administrative, and technical safeguards across network infrastructure and operational processes to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of Protected Health Information (PHI).
A cybersecurity honeypot is a controlled, isolated network resource or system designed as a decoy to lure, trap, and study adversarial tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and gather threat intelligence without impacting production environments.
A "fake" email address that is never used but is published in hidden spots online to catch and analyze automated scraping and spam bots. Watch out for: Any inbound mail sent to an address that has never been assigned to a human, as it is 100% confirmed malicious traffic.
A human firewall is the critical, proactive security measure achieved through comprehensive and continuous training of all personnel, establishing the collective workforce as the primary behavioral defense layer against sophisticated social engineering and various cyber threats.
Human Risk Management (HRM) is a strategic, data-driven cybersecurity methodology that comprehensively identifies, quantifies, and proactively mitigates the systemic security vulnerabilities originating from human behaviors, ensuring alignment with organizational risk tolerance and compliance objectives.
Human-centric security is a holistic cybersecurity methodology that deliberately shifts the focus from purely technical controls like networks or endpoints to prioritize people and their behaviors, proactively integrating threat defense, context-aware data protection, and continuous behavioral reinforcement to mitigate risks and enhance overall security posture.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a critical cybersecurity discipline that establishes a comprehensive framework of governance, protocols, and technical solutions for the secure lifecycle management of digital identities and the enforcement of least-privilege controls over access to sensitive organizational assets.
Identity security is a critical cybersecurity discipline focused on safeguarding digital identities—of users, devices, and organizations—by implementing policies, tools, and processes like MFA and IAM to manage secure access, enforce zero trust principles, defend against identity-based threats, and ensure regulatory compliance.
Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) is a continuous, risk-based cybersecurity framework dedicated to assessing, monitoring, and optimizing the integrity of digital identities, access credentials, and privileges across an enterprise infrastructure to proactively mitigate risks, including credential theft and account takeover.
Identity theft is the unauthorized acquisition and use of an individual's personally identifiable information (PII), such as names, SSNs, financial account numbers, or credentials, to facilitate fraudulent activities, financial gain, or other criminal enterprises, posing a significant threat to data security and privacy.
Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) is a dedicated cybersecurity framework and solution set focused on actively monitoring, detecting, and responding to threats targeting identity and access infrastructure, such as Active Directory and IAM tools, ensuring proactive defense against credential misuse, privilege escalation, and lateral movement by adversaries.
The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is a standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve messages from a mail server. Unlike older methods, IMAP keeps messages on the server, allowing users to synchronize their mailboxes across multiple devices, such as laptops and smartphones. While this provides significant convenience for modern remote work, it also increases the security risk; since the server remains a constant repository for all user data, it must be rigorously protected against unauthorized access attempts and credential theft.
Immutable backups are a critical cyber resilience measure, creating unalterable, read-only data copies for a defined retention period, effectively safeguarding against modification, encryption, or deletion by ransomware, insider threats, or accidental actions, thus ensuring a pristine recovery point.
Incident response is the proactive and structured process for identifying, analyzing, containing, eradicating, and recovering from cybersecurity threats or breaches that exploit vulnerabilities within an organization's systems, ensuring business continuity and minimizing impact.
Indicators of Compromise (IoC) are technical artifacts or observables—such as network anomalies, unexpected configuration changes, or unauthorized software installations—that provide high-confidence evidence to cybersecurity professionals that a computer intrusion or security compromise has occurred or is imminent.
Phishing attacks involve malicious actors employing deceptive email tactics to manipulate recipients into divulging sensitive data, such as credentials or financial information, representing a significant social engineering threat.
IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service, provides essential computing resources—servers, storage, and network components—over the internet. For cybersecurity professionals, this means managing security controls and compliance responsibilities at the operating system and application layers, while the cloud provider secures the underlying physical infrastructure.
Insider risk is the potential for any individual with authorized access—including employees, contractors, or third parties—to intentionally or unintentionally compromise an organization's mission, resources, data, networks, or systems, leading to negative impacts like financial loss, reputational damage, or compliance failure.
An insider threat involves an individual with authorized access, such as an employee or contractor, intentionally or inadvertently leveraging that access to compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of an organization's critical systems, sensitive data, or intellectual property, necessitating continuous monitoring and robust security controls.
Integrated Cloud Email Security (ICES) is an advanced layer of email protection that supplements and enhances the native security features of leading cloud-based email platforms like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, providing robust defense against sophisticated threats such as phishing, malware, and business email compromise (BEC).
Intellectual property (IP) theft is the unauthorized use, exploitation, reproduction, or distribution of protected creative works, trade secrets, source code, patented innovations, and proprietary data. For cybersecurity professionals, this also encompasses license misuse and digital infringement, posing significant legal, financial, and reputational risks to organizations.
Internet cookies are small data packets sent by web servers and stored by a user's browser, fundamentally used to manage HTTP sessions (a stateless protocol), personalize experiences, and track user behavior. For cybersecurity, these text files are vital due to their role in storing authentication and session data, making them targets for cybercriminals.
An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a critical security control, implemented as hardware or software, that continuously analyzes network traffic and system operational metrics to identify and flag patterns indicative of policy violations, unauthorized lateral movement, or active malicious exploitation, providing real-time situational awareness.
An Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) is an essential, proactive network security control that performs deep packet inspection to analyze network traffic patterns in real-time, swiftly identifying and actively blocking or mitigating unauthorized access, sophisticated malicious exploits, and various network threats before they can compromise system integrity or data confidentiality.
Evidence that suggests a security breach has occurred.
The Internet of Things (IoT) comprises interconnected physical devices that automatically communicate via the cloud, often using resource-limited, unpatched operating systems, presenting critical cybersecurity risks like weak authentication, lack of encryption, and firmware vulnerabilities, demanding robust security protocols.
IoT security is a critical cybersecurity strategy encompassing safeguards and protocols to protect connected devices, associated networks, and sensitive data from cyberattacks and breaches. It addresses vulnerabilities like weak authentication, unpatched firmware, and unencrypted communications across diverse endpoints, requiring measures such as network segmentation, strong encryption, and zero-trust frameworks.
An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a unique string of numbers separated by periods that identifies every computer or device communicating over a network. In the realm of email security, the sender's IP address is a primary data point used to verify legitimacy. Security tools track the reputation of these addresses; if an IP has a history of sending spam or malware, it is often blocked by global providers. Identifying unusual or suspicious IP addresses is also a key indicator of a potential security breach.
IP reputation is a critical cybersecurity metric that quantifies the historical trustworthiness of a specific internet address, evaluating its propensity for malicious behavior like spamming, malware distribution, or network attacks, which informs security enforcement actions.
The process of gradually increasing email volume from a new IP to build trust with ISPs; attackers "hijack" warmed-up IPs to send phishing. Watch out for: A sudden shift in the "Tone" or "Content Type" coming from an IP that previously only sent low-volume, benign administrative alerts.
IT compliance involves adherence to mandated regulatory standards, internal policies, and legal frameworks, ensuring an organization's systems, data handling, and operational procedures maintain integrity, confidentiality, and availability, thereby mitigating security risks and avoiding penalties.
A method for identifying the specific client software (like a malicious bot) by fingerprinting its TLS handshake during an email connection. Watch out for: Incoming SMTP connections with a JA3 hash that matches known "Emotet" or "Trickbot" infrastructure rather than a standard Outlook/Gmail client.
The next-gen version of JA3 that includes TCP and HTTP characteristics to identify malicious email senders with higher fidelity. Watch out for: Incoming mail from a "Standard Browser" that has a network fingerprint of a "Python Script," indicating an automated attack bot.
Kerberoasting is an advanced, post-exploitation attack wherein threat actors target Active Directory (AD) environments by requesting service ticket grant access (TGS) for service principal names (SPNs) associated with service accounts. Attackers then extract and crack the encrypted credentials offline to escalate privileges and move laterally within the network.
A keylogger is a stealthy form of surveillance technology, implemented as hardware or software, designed to clandestinely capture and record the sequential keystrokes input by a user on any computing device, posing a significant risk for credential theft and unauthorized data exfiltration.
A model describing the stages of a cyber attack, from reconnaissance to data theft.
LLMs are sophisticated AI architectures, leveraging deep learning on massive text corpora to facilitate advanced natural language processing. For cybersecurity professionals, understanding these models is critical as they present both new defense tools and potential vectors for complex social engineering and automated attacks.
Lateral movement is a post-compromise technique utilized by attackers to propagate through a network, involving the exploitation of credentials and misconfigurations to access and control systems beyond the initial intrusion point, enabling reconnaissance and objective fulfillment.
The principle that a user has only the minimal access rights needed for their job.
Living Off the Land (LOTL) attacks are a sophisticated cyber-attack technique, often fileless, where adversaries exploit native, legitimate, and pre-installed system administration tools (LOLBins like PowerShell or WMI) to execute malicious objectives, evade detection, and maintain persistence within a target system, posing a significant challenge for traditional security solutions.
Malicious code set to execute when specified conditions are met.
Longlining attacks are sophisticated, high-volume phishing campaigns employing mass customization techniques to deliver messages that appear highly targeted and low-volume, effectively mimicking spear-phishing tactics to bypass standard security defenses and deceive cybersecurity professionals and end-users.
Using TLDs that resemble legitimate ones, such as .co instead of .com, or .cm (Cameroon) to catch users who make small typos. Watch out for: Emails from service-department.co when your official company domain is service-department.com.
Machine learning, a core AI subset, utilizes algorithms to autonomously identify patterns in large datasets, enabling systems to detect, predict, and block sophisticated cyber threats and anomalies, continuously improving an organization's security posture without explicit programming.
A virus written in macro language, often found in Word or Excel attachments.
Malicious email attachments are payloads, often obfuscated, delivered via electronic mail, specifically engineered to exploit system vulnerabilities, execute unauthorized code, compromise endpoint security, and facilitate data exfiltration or system damage upon recipient interaction.
Malware, or malicious software, is an overarching term for covert, invasive programs designed to disrupt system operations, steal data, or gain unauthorized access to endpoints, servers, or networks, posing significant security risks.
A Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack is a sophisticated form of active eavesdropping and session hijacking where a malicious actor covertly intercepts, modifies, or relays communications between two parties who believe they are communicating directly, enabling data theft and session compromise.
Managed Security Service (MSS) is the outsourcing of security functions, including continuous monitoring, threat detection, incident response, vulnerability assessments, and compliance management, to expert third-party Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) to enhance an organization's cybersecurity posture and operational efficiency.
A social engineering tactic, the MFA Fatigue Attack involves an adversary persistently generating multi-factor authentication requests to a legitimate user, overwhelming them into approving the malicious login attempt simply to stop the continuous disruption and overloading of authentication prompts.
Using the MIME structure to show a "clean" text version of an email to the security scanner while showing a "malicious" HTML version to the user. Watch out for: Significant discrepancies between the text/plain part and the text/html part of a single email message.
Mimikatz is a post-exploitation open-source tool primarily used by penetration testers and threat actors to extract plain-text passwords, NTLM, and Kerberos credentials from Windows Security Account Manager (SAM) and Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) memory processes, facilitating lateral movement and privilege escalation within compromised networks.
The MITRE ATT&CK Framework is a globally-accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques, derived from real-world observations, used by cybersecurity professionals for threat hunting, detection engineering, red teaming, and assessing defensive posture against known threat actor behaviors across enterprise, mobile, and ICS environments.
Mobile security encompasses the comprehensive strategy, architecture, and technological safeguards implemented to mitigate risks across all devices accompanying users, including corporate and personal smartphones, tablets, and laptops, ensuring data integrity and confidentiality against sophisticated threats.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard designed to connect AI systems and Large Language Models (LLMs) with external data sources, tools, and systems, replacing fragmented integrations with a unified, context-aware protocol. For cybersecurity professionals, it's critical to note that MCP enables arbitrary data access and code execution paths, requiring developers to implement native security features like authentication, authorization, and TLS externally to mitigate risks.
A Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) is a specialized software component that manages the transfer of electronic mail messages from one computer system to another. It acts as the digital post office, receiving mail from senders and routing it to the appropriate destination MTA. Securing the MTA is vital for an organization's defense, as it is the gateway through which all incoming and outgoing mail passes. A misconfigured MTA can be exploited by spammers as an "open relay" to distribute millions of malicious messages.
Using tokens as part of a two-factor process to add extra security beyond passwords.
Multicloud environments involve the strategic deployment of IT infrastructure and applications across distinct public cloud platforms, fundamentally enhancing resilience against single-vendor failure while mitigating downtime risks and demanding unified, platform-agnostic security architecture and governance for comprehensive data protection.
Multifactor Authentication (MFA) is a critical security control requiring users to provide two or more distinct verification factors—such as something they know, have, or are—to gain access. This layered approach significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access and account compromise, even if one credential is stolen, serving as a primary gatekeeper in a zero-trust architecture.
A Mail Exchange (MX) record is a specific entry in a domain's DNS settings that tells the internet which mail server is responsible for accepting incoming messages for that domain. It provides the necessary instructions for routing email correctly. In a secure environment, the MX record often points to a cloud-based security gateway rather than the actual internal mail server. This allows the security service to scan, filter, and clean all incoming messages for threats before they ever reach the organization's internal network.
An annual collaborative initiative, established in 2004, where various government entities and private sector organizations unite efforts to proactively enhance public and professional awareness regarding critical issues in cybersecurity best practices and data privacy protection.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a specialized branch of AI that enables machines to analyze and comprehend unstructured textual data—like emails and threat reports—to detect sophisticated, language-based cyber threats such as phishing, social engineering, and malware, ensuring faster response and better protection.
Network security encompasses the layered deployment of hardware, software, and procedural controls to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of network resources and data from sophisticated internal and external cyber threats, ensuring regulatory compliance and business continuity.
Network-delivered threats are categorized as Passive, like wiretapping and idle scans, focused on intercepting data, or Active, such as Denial of Service and SQL injection, aimed at executing disruptive commands against network operations and integrity.
The NIS2 Directive is the EU's latest cybersecurity legislation, replacing the original NIS Directive, designed to significantly strengthen collective cybersecurity resilience by mandating robust risk management measures and incident reporting requirements for essential and important entities across critical sectors.
NIST Compliance involves adhering to the guidance and best practices—such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF)—developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to manage cybersecurity risk, strengthen data protection, and conform to regulations like FISMA and FedRAMP.
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) is a comprehensive, risk-based framework developed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, providing structured guidelines, standards, and best practices across five core functions—Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover—to effectively manage and mitigate organizational cybersecurity risks.
Sending an email with a blank "Return-Path," which is standard for "Undeliverable" messages but used by attackers to bypass "From-address" filters. Watch out for: High volumes of "Out of Office" or "Bounce" messages that contain suspicious links, as these are often "Out-of-Band" phishing attempts.
OAuth (Open Authorization) is a delegation protocol enabling secure, limited third-party access to protected user resources without exposing credentials, fundamental for modern application integration and critical for managing authorization scope and minimizing exposure risks in federated identity systems.
Tricking a user into clicking "Accept" on a third-party app permissions screen, giving the attacker direct API access to their mailbox without needing a password. Watch out for: "Permissions Requested" alerts in your M365/Google logs for apps with names like "Office 365 Upgrade" requesting Mail.ReadWrite.
Open-source software (OSS) utilizes a collaborative, shared development model where the complete source code is publicly accessible, facilitating security audits, vulnerability detection, and independent modification by the community, offering transparency and often rapid patching capabilities crucial for robust security posture.
Operational Security (OPSEC) is a systematic, continuous risk management process utilized by cybersecurity professionals to proactively identify, control, and protect critical information or indicators that adversaries could exploit to achieve their objectives or inflict harm upon an organization's mission or assets.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology converting physical or image-based text into digital, machine-readable data. For cybersecurity, OCR is vital for indexing, encrypting, and monitoring digitized documents to prevent unauthorized access, detect fraud, and combat threats in illicit online communities by extracting text from images.
The OSI Model is a seven-layer reference architecture that standardizes network communication protocols, defining the functions from physical transmission to application interaction. For cybersecurity professionals, understanding these layers is vital for identifying vulnerabilities, analyzing threat vectors, and implementing appropriate security controls at each stage of data transmission.
PaaS is a cloud service model where the provider manages the underlying infrastructure, operating system, and runtime environment. Cybersecurity professionals focus on securing the application and data, as this shared responsibility model delegates infrastructure security to the cloud provider.
Packet loss is a critical network issue where data packets fail to reach their destination, frequently resulting in data corruption and degradation of network service quality. Cybersecurity professionals must understand its causes, implications for data integrity, and preventative measures to maintain robust network security and reliable operations.
Pass-the-hash (PtH) is a credential theft cyberattack, prevalent in Windows environments, that exploits the authentication mechanism by stealing and leveraging a user's password hash (typically NTLM) to authenticate to network resources and move laterally across a system without needing the plaintext password, enabling privilege escalation and persistent access.
Password managers are critical security applications designed to robustly generate, securely encrypt, and locally or cloud-store unique, complex credentials for multiple online services, facilitating secure access and mitigating risks associated with credential compromise and reuse.
Password protection encompasses comprehensive security strategies, policies, and technologies—including multi-factor authentication (MFA), strong password policies, secure storage with non-reversible encryption, and account lockout mechanisms—to rigorously verify user identity and safeguard authentication methods against unauthorized access and cyber threats.
A security fix for a discovered software weakness.
Patch management strategies are an essential, ongoing component of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) maintenance phase, encompassing the systematic process of identifying, testing, and deploying critical security updates, patches, and hotfixes across an organization's network infrastructure to mitigate vulnerabilities and ensure system integrity.
The part of the malware that performs the malicious action.
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a globally adopted set of contractual operational and technical requirements designed to protect cardholder data and sensitive authentication data. Enforced by the major payment card brands, it provides a crucial baseline for entities—including merchants, processors, and service providers—that store, process, or transmit payment account data to build and maintain a secure environment against threats like identity theft, fraud, and data breaches.
Penetration testing is a simulated cyber attack conducted in a controlled environment to evaluate the security posture of an organization's IT infrastructure by actively exploiting identified and potential vulnerabilities, thereby providing actionable insights for remediation and defense enhancement.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is any information, or combination of information (direct or indirect identifiers), that allows for an individual to be distinguished or traced, requiring stringent data protection controls and adherence to regulatory frameworks like those specified by NIST and various global privacy laws.
Petya is a ransomware family targeting Windows systems, infecting the Master Boot Record (MBR) and overwriting the Windows bootloader. This triggers a reboot, presenting a fake check disk screen while encrypting the Master File Table (MFT) or disk data using algorithms like Salsa20, rendering the system unbootable until a Bitcoin ransom is paid.
Pharming is a sophisticated type of cyber-attack designed to deceive users by redirecting legitimate traffic to malicious websites, often through DNS cache poisoning or local host file modification, enabling the illicit collection of sensitive authentication credentials and personal identifiable information from unsuspecting victims.
Phishing is a deceptive cyberattack tactic employing social engineering via electronic communication channels, such as email or SMS, to illicitly acquire sensitive information, credentials, or deploy malware, often by impersonating a trustworthy entity.
A phishing simulation is a controlled, proactive cybersecurity exercise where entities deploy carefully constructed, realistic mock phishing emails to their personnel. This practice serves as a critical measure for assessing and enhancing organizational resilience, measuring employee susceptibility to social engineering threats, and validating the effectiveness of current security awareness training programs.
Data that could identify a specific individual, like SSNs or phone numbers.
Malware that changes its code every time it runs to avoid detection.
Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) is an older method of retrieving email where messages are downloaded from the server to a single local device and then deleted from the server. While this was useful when server storage was limited, it is often discouraged in modern secure environments. Because POP3 does not synchronize across devices, it creates challenges for data recovery and incident response. Furthermore, it lacks the centralized security benefits offered by modern IMAP or cloud-based mail systems.
Predictive analytics in cybersecurity is a proactive approach leveraging historical and current data, along with algorithms and AI/ML, to anticipate and neutralize potential cyber threats, vulnerabilities, and attacker behaviors before they materialize, enabling risk-informed decision-making and adaptive defenses.
Pretexting is a form of social engineering where attackers establish an elaborate, fabricated scenario, or "pretext," often assuming a false identity, to manipulate victims into knowingly or unknowingly divulging sensitive confidential data, granting unauthorized access to secure systems, or executing actions that compromise organizational security posture.
The Principle of Least Privilege is a critical cybersecurity model requiring that every user, process, or application is granted only the minimum necessary permissions to perform its required functions, thereby minimizing the potential attack surface and limiting damage from compromises.
In cybersecurity, privilege escalation is a post-exploitation technique where an attacker, having gained initial system access, exploits configuration flaws or vulnerabilities to obtain unauthorized, higher-level permissions, often achieving administrative or root rights, to further compromise the environment.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a core cybersecurity discipline focused on securing, monitoring, and controlling privileged access for human and machine identities. By enforcing the principle of least privilege, PAM mitigates risk from internal and external threats, reduces the attack surface, and ensures regulatory compliance through session monitoring and audit logs.
Privileged Identity Management (PIM) is a critical security solution providing just-in-time (JIT) and time-bound access controls for elevated roles within an IT environment, enforcing the principle of least privilege. PIM facilitates granular control, multifactor authentication for activation, and comprehensive auditing to mitigate data breaches and insider threats.
A prompt injection attack is a sophisticated cybersecurity vector exploiting vulnerable machine learning models, specifically large language models (LLMs), by leveraging meticulously crafted, non-obvious user inputs designed to illicitly manipulate the model's behavior and bypass security controls.
Protected Health Information (PHI) is individually identifiable health, treatment, or payment information, transmitted or maintained electronically or otherwise, by a covered entity or business associate. For cybersecurity professionals, this includes all health data and associated identifiers—like names, addresses, and medical record numbers—that must be secured according to HIPAA's Security Rule to protect patient privacy and integrity.
The specific act of targeting and downloading an entire Outlook .pst file to steal a user's entire historical email communication in one go. Watch out for: Unusual IMAP/POP3 sync activity or large outbound data transfers from a workstation to a personal cloud storage site.
A public cloud is an essential third-party hosted model providing shared, multi-tenant "as-a-service" technologies, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, running on remote servers, crucial for scalable infrastructure, identity management, and secure remote resource access.
Promising a benefit in exchange for information, such as fake surveys for gift cards.
Quishing, a form of social engineering, leverages malicious QR codes—two-dimensional barcodes capable of storing extensive data—to illicitly redirect users to compromised websites, steal credentials, or initiate unauthorized malware downloads onto target systems, thereby posing a significant threat to organizational security posture.
Ransomware is a category of malicious software that executes unauthorized encryption or system lockout, denying legitimate users access to their data or infrastructure assets until a monetary ransom is remitted to the threat actor, often involving a critical decryption key exchange.
Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) is a subscription-based cybercriminal business model where RaaS operators provide fully developed ransomware kits, infrastructure, and support to RaaS affiliates, who then execute the attacks. This model often includes profit-sharing arrangements and dedicated dashboards, accelerating the scale and specialization of ransomware threats like DarkSide and LockBit.
Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a passive monitoring technique that captures and analyzes actual end-user interactions and performance data from web applications, providing crucial visibility into user experience, application performance, and identifying anomalies and malicious activities for proactive threat detection and incident response.
A red team comprises highly skilled, authorized security experts who simulate sophisticated, real-world adversary behaviors, tactics, and techniques to provide an objective assessment of an organization's existing security posture, cyber defenses, incident response capabilities, and overall resilience against targeted attacks.
Regulatory compliance is the mandated adherence to laws, regulations, and industry standards, such as GDPR or HIPAA, requiring the implementation of controls, continuous monitoring, and detailed documentation to protect sensitive data and systems against cyber threats, thereby mitigating legal and financial risks.
Malware development is fundamentally driven by the objective of establishing unauthorized remote access and control over a target system, enabling threat actors to execute malicious actions such as data exfiltration or complete device compromise, representing the highest operational benefit.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an advanced technique that enhances generative AI by dynamically retrieving relevant, authoritative context from external knowledge bases—such as threat intelligence or MITRE ATT&CK—to ground outputs, minimize hallucinations, and deliver accurate, actionable cybersecurity insights.
Analyzing potential internal and external threats to an organization.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a systematic, data-driven methodology for cybersecurity professionals to methodically investigate incidents, identify underlying systemic vulnerabilities, and address the true origin of security breaches—such as human error or software flaws—to prevent future recurrence and enhance organizational resilience.
Software tools that enable unauthorized control of a computer system without detection.
SaaS is a cloud-based software delivery model where the provider manages infrastructure and application security, while the customer retains responsibility for identity and access management (IAM), data security, and configuring proper security posture to mitigate risks like data exposure and noncompliance.
SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) is an essential cybersecurity platform that continuously assesses third-party SaaS applications to detect and remediate configuration drift, excessive access rights, shadow SaaS, and compliance gaps. It provides necessary visibility and governance to mitigate application- and identity-centric risks, preventing breaches from misconfigurations.
A cybersecurity sandbox is an isolated, controlled virtual environment designed for safe execution and analysis of potentially malicious or untrusted software code and files, preventing any harmful interaction with the host network, operating system, or critical production resources.
Isolating and testing programs in a secure environment before allowing them through.
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a cloud-native architecture that converges wide area networking (SD-WAN) and comprehensive security functions (SWG, CASB, FWaaS, ZTNA) into a unified, globally distributed service, ensuring consistent, policy-driven security and optimized access for all users, regardless of location.
SD-WAN is a virtualized network architecture leveraging centralized, policy-based control to optimize traffic routing and application performance across diverse network links. For cybersecurity professionals, it provides a platform for integrated security functions, simplifying network architecture, enhancing visibility, and enabling secure cloud access and branch connectivity.
The SEC's cybersecurity regulations establish that digital threats are fundamental to market integrity, requiring proactive measures by regulated entities to ensure investor protection and financial stability against evolving cyber risks.
A secure email gateway (SEG) acts as a critical security checkpoint, inspecting and filtering all inbound and outbound email traffic for malicious or unwanted content, such as spam, malware, and phishing attacks, before delivery to an organization's internal email servers or user inboxes.
Security as a Service (SECaaS) is a cloud-based model delivering scalable, subscription-based security solutions—such as IAM, DLP, and threat monitoring—that integrate with existing IT infrastructure. It offers specialized expertise, reduced complexity, and continuous protection against advanced threats without requiring dedicated in-house staff.
Security awareness training is a critical, ongoing educational program designed to equip employees with the knowledge and practical skills necessary to recognize, mitigate, and appropriately respond to cyber threats, thereby protecting organizational assets and sensitive data from various forms of loss or harm.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) aggregates and analyzes security data from various sources across the IT infrastructure, providing cybersecurity professionals with real-time, correlated visibility for threat detection, compliance reporting, and security incident response.
A centralized location for continuous monitoring of security issues.
SOAR, or Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response, is a security framework utilizing integrated tools and software to automate repetitive security tasks and orchestrate complex workflows, enabling security operations teams to streamline threat detection, analysis, and coordinated response efforts more efficiently.
Security Service Edge (SSE) is the security component of the SASE model, integrating cloud-delivered services like SWG, ZTNA, CASB, and FWaaS to enforce Zero Trust access, secure data, and provide threat protection for remote users accessing web, cloud, and private applications.
The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an essential email authentication protocol utilizing DNS TXT records to specify authorized mail servers allowed to send email for a domain, preventing email spoofing and mitigating phishing and spam campaigns by enabling recipient servers to verify the sender's IP address against the published authorized list.
Sendmail is a foundational Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) server application employing the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) for email transmission, often targeted in cyberattacks. Cybersecurity professionals recognize it requires careful configuration due to numerous historical vulnerabilities, including those enabling SMTP smuggling, arbitrary command injection, and link following exploits, necessitating continuous patching and monitoring.
Sensitive data encompasses all information necessitating stringent protective measures against unauthorized access, disclosure, modification, or destruction, as its compromise could severely impact individual privacy, organizational operations, financial stability, or national security interests, requiring adherence to regulatory frameworks and robust security controls.
Organizing assets by value to guide protection decisions.
Session hijacking is a sophisticated attack vector where an unauthorized entity exploits stolen or intercepted session identifiers—such as cookies or authentication tokens—to bypass security mechanisms, impersonate validated users, and gain persistent, unauthorized control over web applications, accounts, or corporate resources.
Shadow AI is the unauthorized deployment and use of AI tools and models by employees, creating significant blind spots for IT and security teams. This introduces critical risks, including sensitive data leakage, regulatory non-compliance, and operational disruption due to lack of formal oversight and governance.
Shadow IT, a significant governance challenge, describes the unauthorized deployment and use of cloud-connected applications, software, or services by employees within an organization's network perimeter without the explicit awareness, approval, or centralized oversight of the internal IT department.
Employees using personal email accounts or unauthorized tools (like Mailchimp) to send sensitive corporate data, bypassing the Secure Email Gateway. Watch out for: Corporate documents being sent to @yahoo.com or @protonmail.com addresses that belong to current employees.
The Shared Responsibility Model is a security framework that defines which tasks belong to the cloud provider and which belong to the user. While the provider (like Microsoft) secures the underlying infrastructure, the user remains responsible for their own data, identities, and security configurations. In email security, this means an organization must still implement its own phishing filters, access controls, and multi-factor authentication, even if they are using a reputable cloud email service to host their communications.
Software that collects and analyzes security alerts from across a network.
SIM swapping, a serious account-takeover technique also known as SIM hijacking or port-out fraud, involves social engineering or malice to redirect a victim's legitimate mobile service to a fraudulent SIM card controlled by an attacker, facilitating unauthorized access to multi-factor authentication codes and sensitive accounts.
Single sign-on (SSO) is an identity and access management (IAM) mechanism allowing verified users to authenticate once, gaining secure, authorized access to multiple disparate, integrated applications and systems without re-entering credentials, often relying on protocols like SAML or OAuth 2.0.
Smishing is a social engineering attack utilizing SMS/text messages to deceive mobile device users into disclosing sensitive credentials or installing malware, thereby facilitating unauthorized access to systems or private data, representing a significant mobile threat vector.
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the standard technical language that mail servers use to communicate and send messages to one another. It provides the rules for how email is packaged and delivered across the internet. However, because the original SMTP protocol lacked built-in security features, it is highly susceptible to spoofing and interception. Modern defenses must add layers of security, such as TLS for encryption and SPF/DKIM for authentication, to protect the integrity of the SMTP transmission.
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the fundamental networking standard governing the transmission and relaying of email messages between mail servers across the internet. Due to its essential role, SMTP traffic is frequently exploited by threat actors for phishing, malware distribution, spoofing, and sending spam, necessitating continuous security monitoring and anomaly detection.
Tools that help security teams automate their response to threats.
A Security Operations Center (SOC) is a centralized organizational function, physical or virtual, dedicated to the continuous monitoring, analysis, and management of an organization's security posture, including the prevention, detection, investigation, and coordinated response to advanced cybersecurity incidents and threats.
SOC 2, or Service Organization Control 2, is a rigorous auditing framework defining standards for managing client data based on five Trust Service Criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy, ensuring data governance and risk management are robust for service organizations.
The human element represents the most critical vulnerability in cybersecurity defense, as malicious social engineering tactics exploit the inherent tendency of users to fail to recognize and appropriately respond to sophisticated deceptive attack vectors.
Social media archiving involves the secure, systematic capture and immutable preservation of all enterprise social media data, including content, context, and associated metadata, ensuring compliance with regulatory mandates, enabling robust e-discovery for litigation, and maintaining comprehensive audit trails for forensic analysis and information governance.
Social media protection solutions are specialized cybersecurity tools designed to mitigate risks associated with corporate social media presence, encompassing unauthorized access prevention, the detection and remediation of brand impersonation accounts, executive spoofing, and the critical filtering of malicious or harmful content targeting customers.
Social media platforms facilitate connectivity and content sharing, yet excessive disclosure or inadequate verification against malicious entities, such as impostors, significantly elevates the risk of compromise to both corporate assets and individual user accounts, necessitating robust security protocols.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a delivery model that allows users to access cloud-based applications via a web browser without needing to install software locally. Most modern email platforms, such as Gmail and Microsoft 365, are SaaS tools. While SaaS provides flexibility and automatic updates, it also requires organizations to trust a third party with their data. This shift necessitates robust identity management and third-party risk assessments to ensure that the provider's security standards meet the organization’s compliance requirements.
A Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) is a zero-trust security methodology that dynamically controls access to networked resources based on verified user identity and device posture. It reduces the threat surface by creating an invisible, virtual boundary around application infrastructure, ensuring users only access authorized applications, thereby minimizing cyber risk and third-party exposure.
SOX compliance necessitates rigorous adherence to legal mandates for financial data security and integrity, requiring cybersecurity professionals to implement and maintain robust internal controls, ensuring accurate record-keeping, and protecting sensitive financial systems and data from unauthorized access or manipulation to prevent fraudulent financial reporting.
Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), commonly known as spam, is the abuse of electronic messaging systems involving the indiscriminate sending of bulk, unwanted messages for commercial purposes. UCE poses a significant cybersecurity risk by often containing malicious content, phishing schemes, and links used to spread malware, facilitate identity theft, and compromise digital infrastructures.
Spear phishing is a highly personalized and targeted type of social engineering attack that specifically aims at individuals or organizations, often via malicious emails, texts, or calls. Attackers research targets to craft credible, fraudulent messages from seemingly trusted sources, intending to steal credentials, deploy malware/ransomware, or acquire financial data undetected.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a critical email authentication method used to prevent attackers from spoofing your domain. It involves creating a DNS record that lists all the specific IP addresses and servers authorized to send emails on your behalf. When a message is received, the recipient's server checks this list; if the sender's IP is not authorized, the email may be flagged as spam or rejected. SPF is a foundational component of modern email security and works alongside DKIM and DMARC.
In cybersecurity, spoofing is the deceptive practice where an attacker deliberately falsifies data or communication origins to masquerade as a trusted entity, thereby gaining unauthorized access or disseminating malware within a network infrastructure.
Spyware is malicious software installed secretly to monitor and collect sensitive data—such as keystrokes, network traffic, authentication credentials, and financial information—often resulting in data theft, identity fraud, and system disruption, leveraging methods like Trojans, malicious BHOs, or system monitor techniques.
SQL injection (SQLi) is a critical vulnerability where an attacker exploits improper handling of user input to insert malicious SQL commands into an application's data-plane input. This manipulation alters the intended structure of database queries, potentially leading to unauthorized data retrieval, modification, deletion, or loss of system control, commonly targeting web applications utilizing SQL databases.
Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP) is a proprietary Microsoft VPN protocol using SSL/TLS encryption over TCP port 443 to tunnel Point-to-Point Protocol traffic, ensuring secure, firewall-resistant remote access, primarily advantageous within Windows infrastructures despite its closed-source nature.
Stale data, within a cybersecurity context, constitutes digital information that is demonstrably outdated, unused, or contextually irrelevant, yet persistently resides within active storage systems. Its continued presence significantly expands the organization's attack surface and introduces compliance risks, potentially leading to unauthorized data exposure or operational inefficiency.
Finding an abandoned subdomain (e.g., dev.old-brand.com) that still has your company's SPF record and using it to send "trusted" phishing mail. Watch out for: Spikes in outbound email from subdomains that were officially retired or haven't been used by the company in years.
Comprehensive intellectual property (IP) and data protection mandates a strategy extending beyond conventional system cybersecurity measures, requiring the implementation of holistic security controls, policies, and continuous monitoring to effectively mitigate threats and safeguard sensitive organizational assets against escalating theft risks.
A supply chain attack is a sophisticated vector compromising an organization's security by surreptitiously injecting malicious code, libraries, or components into legitimate software or hardware products, often bypassing established security controls and targeting trusted third-party dependencies.
Supply chain security is a multi-layered, risk-management approach encompassing strategies, protocols, and technologies—including both physical and digital cybersecurity measures—to protect an organization's entire network of resources, processes, and third-party partnerships from malicious attacks, unauthorized access, and the introduction of compromised hardware or software components.
Synthetic identity fraud is a sophisticated financial crime involving the fabrication of an identity, often a "Frankenstein ID," by combining elements of real, stolen personally identifiable information (PII)—like a SSN—with fictitious data (name, address). This complexity makes it difficult to detect with traditional monitoring systems.
Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) are the high-level strategies (tactics), intermediate methods (techniques), and detailed sequences of actions (procedures) utilized by threat actors to execute a cyberattack. Understanding TTPs is fundamental for cybersecurity professionals to develop robust defense mechanisms, enhance threat intelligence, and optimize incident response plans against adversaries.
Following an authorized person into a secure physical area without permission.
A tailgating attack, also known as piggybacking, is a physical security breach where an unauthorized individual gains access to restricted, secured premises by immediately following an authorized person through a checkpoint, often exploiting human trust or distraction without presenting valid credentials.
Telemetry, for cybersecurity professionals, is the critical, continuous process of gathering, correlating, and analyzing data from diverse sources—including endpoints, cloud environments, and security logs—to gain broad environmental visibility, enabling swift threat detection, incident response, and proactive security measures.
A thin client is a network-dependent endpoint device leveraging a centralized server for all services and data processing, offering organizations streamlined security, simplified management, and reduced risk due to minimal local storage and attack surface.
A threat actor is an individual or group, internal or external, that instigates risks and possesses the capability and motivation—often financial, political, or thrill-seeking—to exploit system vulnerabilities using tactics like malware and phishing to compromise data security and perpetrate cyberattacks.
Threat intelligence is the analysis of adversaries, their motivations, capabilities, and indicators of compromise, providing actionable context to cybersecurity professionals. This crucial data enables proactive defense, swift incident response, and strategic risk management to protect organizational assets from evolving cyber threats.
TOTP is a critical component of two-factor authentication (2FA), adhering to the OATH standard, which generates a temporary, time-constrained passcode using a shared secret key and cryptographic functions, offering a significantly superior and more secure mechanism than event-based HOTP against modern cybersecurity threats.
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide secure communication over a computer network. In email, TLS is used to encrypt messages while they are moving between servers, preventing "man-in-the-middle" attackers from reading or stealing the contents. While TLS protects the data in transit, it does not protect the email once it has arrived at its destination. Therefore, it must be used as part of a broader encryption strategy that includes protecting data at rest to meet compliance standards.
A Trojan Horse is a class of malware that deceptively masquerades as benign or desirable software to infiltrate a system, gaining unauthorized access and executing malicious payloads under the pretense of legitimacy, often enabling remote control or data exfiltration.
Typosquatting, or URL hijacking, is a social engineering attack where malicious actors register domain names that are misspellings of legitimate sites to deceive users into visiting fraudulent pages. This technique is often used for phishing, malware delivery, or data theft by exploiting common typographical errors like transpositions or omissions.
User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) is a sophisticated cybersecurity methodology leveraging machine learning and statistical analysis to detect anomalous activities, identify potential insider threats, and reveal external attacks by baselining normal behavior across users, applications, and endpoints.
Unstructured data, lacking a predefined data model in various formats like emails, documents, and videos, is a significant challenge for cybersecurity professionals. Its complexity, volume, and sprawl often lead to lack of visibility, making governance and access control difficult, thus heightening data breach risk and compliance violations.
Examining a web address to see if it is linked to malicious activity.
A technique where the human-readable VBA source code is removed from a Word/Excel doc, leaving only the "compiled" code to bypass static security scanners. Watch out for: Documents that appear to have "No Macros" in a basic search but execute malicious code when detonated in a secure sandbox.
Tools used to scan assets for malicious software like viruses.
Vishing, a prevalent social engineering tactic, utilizes phone calls and manipulated voice communication technology to deceptively acquire confidential data from victims, bypassing traditional network security protocols and constituting a significant vector for cybersecurity risk and fraud.
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) establishes a secure, encrypted tunnel over a public network, masking the user's IP address and securing data transmission confidentiality and integrity, which is critical for remote access and mitigating man-in-the-middle attacks.
A vulnerability in a cybersecurity context is a critical flaw or weakness, originating in the design, operational processes, implementation, or system management, that constitutes an exploitable entry point enabling an adversary to execute unauthorized access, information disclosure, or cause detrimental system harm.
WannaCry was a globally catastrophic 2017 ransomware campaign leveraging the EternalBlue exploit against Windows SMB vulnerabilities, rapidly encrypting corporate data across numerous sectors and demanding Bitcoin payment, highlighting critical patching failures in unmanaged systems worldwide.
A watering hole attack is a highly focused cyber-attack where adversaries infect websites frequently visited by a target group, such as a specific industry or organization, in order to compromise unsuspecting users when they navigate to the legitimate, but now malicious, site.
Infecting a website that a specific group of people visits often to infect the visitors.
A web proxy server is an intermediate system used by organizations primarily for security, by masking internal IP addresses, and for performance optimization, by caching content to reduce bandwidth consumption and enhance data transfer efficiency.
Web security is the comprehensive practice of protecting an organization’s data, network resources, and systems against online threats like malware, phishing, data theft, and sophisticated attacks (e.g., DDoS, session hijacking), utilizing technologies such as WAFs and security awareness programs.
A phishing attack targeted specifically at high-profile executives.
Whaling is a highly targeted, advanced social engineering phishing attack aimed exclusively at senior executives, like C-level personnel, leveraging their high-level access to sensitive corporate data and significant financial assets for malicious gain.
A list of approved senders or domains that are always allowed through.
Wi-Fi, standardized under IEEE 802.11 protocols, enables wireless local area networking (WLAN) using radio waves for connectivity. This technology organizes data into 802.11 frames, similar to Ethernet, utilizing MAC addresses for routing, demanding specific security implementations to protect data integrity and network access.
Malware that spreads copies of itself between computers without human interaction.
Manually setting the X-Priority: 1 (Highest) header to force a "Red Flag" icon in the recipient's inbox, increasing the psychological pressure to click. Watch out for: Emails from external senders that are marked as "High Priority" but involve mundane tasks or generic "Security Alerts."
A known flaw that does not have a fix or patch yet.
Zero Trust is a security paradigm where no user or device, whether inside or outside the network perimeter, is inherently trusted. It requires continuous verification of every access request based on context, strong authentication, authorization, and validation of the user, device, and service prior to granting minimum necessary access.
A zero-day vulnerability is a newly discovered, unknown security flaw in software or hardware for which the developer has not yet created a patch or mitigation. This critical exposure is actively exploited by threat actors before security professionals are aware, demanding immediate, high-priority remediation actions.
Zeus is a foundational banking trojan, notorious for its longevity and success in credential harvesting. Originating as one of the oldest forms of financial malware, its code base was ultimately sold, leading to the proliferation of numerous subsequent variants that continue to pose threats to global financial institutions and users.
