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
  • "property of a system such that it does not, under defined conditions, lead to a state in which human life, health, property, or the environment is endangered; [safety involves reducing both the probability of expected harms and the possibility of unexpected harms]."
  • Sampling usually (but not always) refers to the process of statistically testing a data set for the likelihood of relevant information. It can be a useful technique in addressing a number of issues relating to litigation, including decisions as to which repositories of data should be(...)
  •  A network or series of networks that are not connected to other networks. 
  • "The ability to increase or decrease the computational resources required to execute a varying volume of tasks, processes, or services."
  • Scanning is the process of converting a hard copy paper document into a digital image for use in a computer system. After a document has been scanned, it can be reviewed using field and full-text searching, instant document retrieval, and a complete range of electronic document review options. 
  • "A continuous value output from a classifier. Applying a threshold to a score results in a predicted label."
  • "Screen-out discrimination occurs when “a disability prevents a job applicant or employee from meeting—or lowers their performance on—a selection criterion, and the applicant or employee loses a job opportunity as a result.”"
  • Definition: A cryptographic key that is used for both encryption and decryption, enabling the operation of a symmetric key cryptography scheme. Extended Definition: Also, a cryptographic algorithm that uses a single key (i.e., a secret key) for both encryption of plaintext and decryption(...)
  • Definition: A NICE Framework category consisting of specialty areas concerned with conceptualizing, designing, and building secure IT systems, with responsibility for some aspect of the systems' development.
  • "resistance to intentional, unauthorized act(s) designed to cause harm or damage to a system"
  • Definition: The use of information technology in place of manual processes for cyber incident response and management.
  • Definition: A rule or set of rules that govern the acceptable use of an organization's information and services to a level of acceptable risk and the means for protecting the organization's information assets.
  • Definition: In the NICE Framework, cybersecurity work where a person: Manages information security (e.g., information security) implications within the organization, specific program, or other area of responsibility, to include strategic, personnel, infrastructure, policy enforcement,(...)
  • "The process of identifying homogeneous subgroups within a data table."
  • "Decision-makers are more likely to follow advice (human or algorithmic-based) that matches stereotypical views of the decision subjects."
  • "A computing platform imbued with sufficient knowledge and analytic capability to make useful conclusions about its inputs, its own processing, and the use of its output so that it is capable of self- judgment and improvement consistent with its purpose."
  • "Ability of a system to adequately take measurement information from sensors, validate the data, and communicate the processes and results to other devices"
  • "A computing system able to perceive that it is not operating correctly and, without human intervention, make the necessary adjustments to restore itself to normalcy."
  • "A strategic schema or framework of metadata labels applied to all data, data groups, data fields, data types, or data content used to introduce new or raw data into a corpus or data fabric to give machine learning algorithms direction for investigating known or potential relationships between(...)
  • "a specific set of "special categories" that must be treated with extra security[, including] information about: [r]acial or ethnic origin; [p]olitical opinions; [r]eligious or philosophical beliefs; [t]rade union membership; [g]enetic data; [d]ata related to a person's sex life or sexual(...)
  • "A “what-if” type of analysis to determine the sensitivity of the outcomes to changes in parameters. If a small change in a parameter results in relatively large changes in the outcomes, the outcomes are said to be sensitive to that parameter."
  • "The conversion of typically analog or human sensory perception (e.g., vision, speech) to a digital format useful for machine-to-human interaction or machine processing of traditionally analog sensory information [e.g., optical character recognition (OCR)]."
  • Any computer on a network that contains data or applications shared by users of the network on their client PCs. 
  • "A collection of coordinated processes that takes one or more kinds of input, performs a value-added transformation, and creates an output that fulfills the needs of a customer [or shareholder]."
  • "Techniques that separate the process of feature extraction from learning itself."