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
  • "can be checked for correctness by a person or tool"
  • Definition: A computer program that can replicate itself, infect a computer without permission or knowledge of the user, and then spread or propagate to another computer.Related Term(s): macro virus
  • A piece of malicious programming code designed to create an unexpected and, for the victim, usually undesirable event. 
  • A vlog is a Weblog that uses video as its primary medium for distributing content. Vlog posts are usually accompanied by text, image, and other metadata to provide a context or overview for the video. 
  • A virtually private network that is constructed by using public wires to connect nodes.
  • Definition: A characteristic or specific weakness that renders an organization or asset (such as information or an information system) open to exploitation by a given threat or susceptible to a given hazard. Extended Definition: Characteristic of location or security posture or of design,(...)
  • Definition: In the NICE Framework, cybersecurity work where a person: Conducts assessments of threats and vulnerabilities, determines deviations from acceptable configurations, enterprise or local policy, assesses the level of risk, and develops and/or recommends appropriate mitigation(...)
  • "a marketing effort designed to imply that a company's brands and products involve artificial intelligence technologies, even though the connection may be tenuous or non-existent."
  • Definition: A shortcoming or imperfection in software code, design, architecture, or deployment that, under proper conditions, could become a vulnerability or contribute to the introduction of vulnerabilities.Related Term(s): vulnerability
  • A collection of Uniform Resource Indicators (URIs, including URLs (Uniform Resource Locators)) in the control of one administrative entity. May include different types of URIs (i.e., file transfer protocol sites, telnet sites, as well as World Wide Web sites). 
  • Definition: A group responsible for refereeing an engagement between a Red Team of mock attackers and a Blue Team of actual defenders of information systems.Related Term(s): Blue Team, Red Team
  • "a popular framework to represent text data as vectors which has been used in many machine learning and natural language processing tasks. . . . A word embedding, trained on word co-occurrence in text corpora, represents each word (or common phrase) w as a d-dimensional word vector w~ 2 Rd. It(...)
  • A software program used for preparing documents 
  • Definition: An estimate of the effort or time needed by a potential adversary, with specified expertise and resources, to overcome a protective measure.
  • The WWW is made up of all of the computers on the Internet which use HTML-capable software (Netscape, Explorer, etc.) to exchange data. Data exchange on the WWW is characterized by easy-to-use graphical interfaces, hypertext links, images, and sound. Today the WWW has become synonymous with(...)
  • Definition: A self-replicating, self-propagating, self-contained program that uses networking mechanisms to spread itself.
  • A malicious software program capable of moving from computer to computer over a network without being carried by another program. 
  • An open standard for compression and decompression used widely for PC download archives. ZIP is used on Windows-based programs such as WinZip and Drag and Zip. The file extension given to ZIP files is .zip.