Cyber Security Glossary

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

AJAX progress indicator
All categories All categories
  • Term
    Definition
  • "See technochauvinism."
  • "The belief that technology is always the solution"
  • Definition: In the NICE Framework, cybersecurity work where a person: Conducts technology assessment and integration processes; provides and supports a prototype capability and/or evaluates its utility.
  • A terabyte is a measure of computer data storage capacity and is one thousand billion (1,000,000,000,000) bytes. 
  • "Technical operation to determine one or more characteristics of or to evaluate the performance of a given product, material, equipment, organism, physical phenomenon, process or service according to a specified procedure."
  • Definition: In the NICE Framework, cybersecurity work where a person: Develops and conducts tests of systems to evaluate compliance with specifications and requirements by applying principles and methods for cost-effective planning, evaluating, verifying, and validating of technical,(...)
  • "A framework for assessing, incorporating methods and metrics to determine that a technology or system satisfactorily meets its design specifications and requirements, and that it is sufficient for its intended use."
  • "an entity that is involved in some way in an interaction that is primarily between two other entities. [Please see note, especially regarding NIST CSRC terms that we might incorporate into this definition.]"
  • Definition: A circumstance or event that has or indicates the potential to exploit vulnerabilities and to adversely impact (create adverse consequences for) organizational operations, organizational assets (including information and information systems), individuals, other organizations, or(...)
  • "See bad actor."
  • Definition: An individual, group, organization, or government that conducts or has the intent to conduct detrimental activities. Related Term(s): adversary, attacker
  • Definition: In the NICE Framework, cybersecurity work where a person: Identifies and assesses the capabilities and activities of cyber criminals or foreign intelligence entities; produces findings to help initialize or support law enforcement and counterintelligence investigations or activities.
  • Definition: The product or process of identifying or evaluating entities, actions, or occurrences, whether natural or man-made, that have or indicate the potential to harm life, information, operations, and/or property.Related Term(s): threat analysis
  • "Most financial institutions follow a three-lines-of-defense model, which separates front line groups, which are generally accountable for business risks (the First Line), from other risk oversight and independent challenge groups (the Second Line) and assurance (the Third Line)"
  • Definition: In access control, data that authenticates the identity of a client or a service and, together with a temporary encryption key (a session key), forms a credential.
  • One of the most widely supported file formats for storing bit-mapped images. Files in TIFF format often end with a .tif extension. 
  • "Ability to trace the history, application or location of an entity by means of recorded identification. ["Chain of custody" is a related term.] Alternatively, traceability is a property of the result of a measurement or the value of a standard whereby it can be related with a stated(...)
  • Definition: A set of designations employing four colors (RED, AMBER, GREEN, and WHITE) used to ensure that sensitive information is shared with the correct audience.
  • "A dataset from which a model is learned."
  • "Enactment of a process represented by a set of coordinated activities carried out by multiple systems and/or participants in accordance with defined relationships. This coordination leads to an intentional, consistent, and verifiable result across all participants."
  • "A technique in machine learning in which an algorithm learns to perform one task, such as recognizing cars, and builds on that knowledge when learning a different but related task, such as recognizing cats."
  • "A procedure that modifies a dataset."
  • A collection of protocols that define the basic workings of the features of the Internet. 
  • " open, comprehensive, accessible, clear and understandable presentation of information; property of a system or process to imply openness and accountability"
  • Definition: A computer program that appears to have a useful function, but also has a hidden and potentially malicious function that evades security mechanisms, sometimes by exploiting legitimate authorizations of a system entity that invokes the program.