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
  • Spoliation is the destruction of records which may be relevant to ongoing or anticipated litigation, government investigation or audit. Courts differ in their interpretation of the level of intent required before sanctions may be warranted. 
  • Definition: Faking the sending address of a transmission to gain illegal [unauthorized] entry into a secure system.Extended Definition: The deliberate inducement of a user or resource to take incorrect action. Note: Impersonating, masquerading, piggybacking, and mimicking are forms of spoofing.
  • Definition: Software that is secretly or surreptitiously installed into an information system without the knowledge of the system user or owner.Related Term(s): keylogger
  • "Individual or organization having a right, share, claim, or interest in a system or in its possession of characteristics that meet their needs and expectations. An individual, group, or organization who may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or(...)
  • A personal computer that is not connected to any other computer or network, except possibly through a modem. 
  • "The most widely used measure of dispersion of a frequency distribution introduced by K. Pearson (1893). It is equal to the positive square root of the variance. The standard deviation should not be confused with the root mean square deviation."
  • "An activity, task, or input that describes or defines the beginning of a process."
  • "A systematic tendency for estimates or measurements to be above or below their true values. Statistical biases arise from systematic as opposed to random error. Statistical bias can occur in the absence of prejudice, partiality, or discriminatory intent."
  • "The independence between the protected attribute and the outcome of the decision rule"
  • "When the probability of obtaining a statistic of a given size due strictly to random sampling error, or chance, is less than the selected alpha level [or the probability of a type I error]; also represents a rejection of the null hypothesis."
  • "Numerical data relating to an aggregate of individuals; the science of collecting, analysing and interpreting such data"
  • "Definition 3b (figurative): A preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc.; an attitude based on such a preconception. Also, a person who appears to conform closely to the idea of a type."
  • "The adjective “stochastic” implies the presence of a random variable; e.g. stochastic variation is variation in which at least one of the elements is a variate and a stochastic process is one wherein the system incorporates an element of randomness as opposed to a deterministic system."
  • "The successful execution of a service, process, or transaction performed entirely through traditional application platforms with predefined interfaces (i.e., application programming interfaces [APIs])."
  • Definition: In the NICE Framework, cybersecurity work where a person: Applies knowledge of priorities to define an entity.
  • "a fallacious argument which irrelevantly attacks a position that appears similar to, but is actually different from, an opponent's position, and concludes that the opponent's real position has thereby been refuted."
  • "Type of performance efficiency testing conducted to evaluate a test item's behavior under conditions of loading above anticipated or specified capacity requirements, or of resource availability below minimum specified requirements"
  • "AI that is capable of solving almost all tasks that humans can solve"
  • "Data that has a predefined data model or is organized in a predefined way."
  • "A subordinate process that can be included within a parent process. It can be present and/or repeated within other parent processes."
  • Definition: An individual, process, or device causing information to flow among objects or a change to the system state.Related Term(s): object, access, access control
  • "A type of machine learning in which the algorithm compares its outputs with the correct outputs during training. In unsupervised learning, the algorithm merely looks for patterns in a set of data."
  • Definition: A generic name for a computerized system that is capable of gathering and processing data and applying operational controls to geographically dispersed assets over long distances. Related Term(s): Industrial Control System
  • Definition: A system of organizations, people, activities, information and resources, for creating and moving products including product components and/or services from suppliers through to their customers.Related Term(s): supply chain risk management
  • Definition: The process of identifying, analyzing, and assessing supply chain risk and accepting, avoiding, transferring or controlling it to an acceptable level considering associated costs and benefits of any actions taken.Related Term(s): supply chain