Cyber Security Glossary

Find definitions for IT security and compliance in our online glossary of key terms, acronyms, and vocabulary.

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  • Term
    Definition
  • "The ability to understand the value and accuracy of system output. Interpretability refers to the extent to which a cause and effect can be observed within �a system or to which what is going to happen given a change in input or algorithmic parameters can be predicted."
  • "An interpretable machine learning model obeys a domain-specific set of constraints to allow it (or its predictions, or the data) to be more easily understood by humans. These constraints can differ dramatically depending on the domain."
  • "the property that intervention is possible concerning all ongoing or planned privacy relevant data processing[; ...] the data subjects themselves should be able to intervene with regards to the processing of their own data ... [to ensure] that data subjects have the ability to control how(...)
  • A network of interconnecting smaller private networks that are isolated from the public Internet. 
  • Definition: An unauthorized act of bypassing the security mechanisms of a network or information system.Synonym(s): penetration
  • Definition: The process and methods for analyzing information from networks and information systems to determine if a security breach or security violation has occurred.
  • Definition: a NICE Framework category consisting of specialty areas responsible for the investigation of cyber events and/or crimes of IT systems, networks, and digital evidence
  • Definition: A systematic and formal inquiry into a qualified threat or incident using digital forensics and perhaps other traditional criminal inquiry techniques to determine the events that transpired and to collect evidence.
  • A string of four numbers separated by periods used to represent a computer on the Internet. 
  • Usually refers to the people who make computers and computer systems run. 
  • A business that delivers access to the Internet.
  • An image compression standard for photographs. 
  • Definition: The numerical value used to control cryptographic operations, such as decryption, encryption, signature generation, or signature verification. Related Term(s): private key, public key, secret key, symmetric key
  • Definition: Two mathematically related keys having the property that one key can be used to encrypt a message that can only be decrypted using the other key.Related Term(s): private key, public key
  • Definition: A publicly or privately controlled asset necessary to sustain continuity of government and/or economic operations, or an asset that is of great historical significance.Related Term(s): critical infrastructure
  • Definition: Software or hardware that tracks keystrokes and keyboard events, usually surreptitiously / secretly, to monitor actions by the user of an information system.Related Term(s): spyware
  • A search for documents containing one or more words that are specified by a user. 
  • "a form of safety mechanism used to completely shut off a device in case of an emergency situation where it cannot be shut off using the normal process or if immediate shut off is required."
  • One thousand bytes of data is 1K of data.
  • "The sum of all information derived from diagnostic, descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics embedded in or available to or from a cognitive computing system."
  • Definition: In the NICE Framework, cybersecurity work where a person: Manages and administers processes and tools that enable the organization to identify, document, and access intellectual capital and information content.
  • "A value corresponding to an outcome."
  • "Under label shift, the label distribution p(y) might change but the class-conditional distributions p(x|y) do not. ... We work with the label shift assumption, i.e., ps(x|y) = pt(x|y)"
  • Usually refers to a network of computers in a single building or other discrete location.
  • "A language model is an approximative description that captures patterns and regularities present in natural language and is used for making assumptions on previously unseen language fragments."