The Cybersecurity Thesaurus!
On this page, we have listed all the common cybersecurity and hacking terminologies for your reference. While you can learn about these topics in our articles, here we explain the terms in one or two sentences for future reference.
Cyber Attack or Hack – An activity by an individual or a group, whether internal or external, that gains illegal access to your network, data, or computer systems to cause harm or damage to the company, or to disrupt and destroy the computing environment.
Vulnerability – Weaknesses in an information system, procedures, or implementation that might allow a malicious actor to exploit for personal gain.
Exploit – A vulnerability that has been used to gain access to an IT system or network.
Data Breach - Unauthorized access to sensitive data by internal or external party and might result in data theft.
Data Loss - Unintentional exposure of sensitive data that result in data being misplaced, lost, or theft. Data Loss is not due to cybercriminals.
Cyber Threat – Potential threats in the cyber space that has the potential to cause harm or damage to a digital infrastructure or an individual.
Phishing – a communication by a hacker that aims to get you to click on a malicious link or an attachment that will steal sensitive information or download a malware on the computer system.
Vishing – Using voice call as a medium for the phishing attack.
Smishing – Using SMS as a medium for the phishing attack
Whaling – Phishing attempts that target the big fish – CEO, CFO, or any other Cxx specific for the business.
Spear Phishing – Phishing attack that is tailored with the target in mind.
Business Email Compromise – Hacker tries to send emails that appear to be legitimate but are for malicious purposes like sending money to a different account, asking for confidential information. This is primarily done via spoofing the email address.
Hacker – A person or a group that uses their technical powers and exploit the average person’s lack of knowledge to cause harm, disrupt, or destroy a person or an organization’s digital assets, identity, and accessibility. The motivation of each hackers is different, allowing them to be sub categorized further
Hacktivist and Hacktivism – a type of hacker that causes harm to an individual or an organization not for personal gain, but to display civil disobedience to promote a political agenda or social change. Mostly, they are vocal about free speech.
Cyber Criminal – A hacker that has the ultimate purpose for gaining monetary benefit by using hacking techniques on individuals and organizations.
Nation State Sponsored Hackers – Hackers that are hired by governments to steal other country’s confidential information, cause damage to their businesses and critical infrastructure, while protecting their own country from similar damage.
Insider Threat or Whistleblower – an employee or staff of a business that has access to confidential information and will expose that information to the public or a competitor due to personal grudge, personal beliefs, frustration, or for monetary benefits.
Malware – a malicious software that is made with the intent to cause harm to individuals, computer systems and networks. They perform variety of function, depending on the hacker who created them.
Virus – Type of a computer program that replicated itself by modifying other computer programs and inserting its own source code.
Ransomware – A type of malware that spreads across a computer or a network, encrypts all the files, and then demands ransom to unencrypt the files.
Stalkerware – A type of malware that allows the hacker to monitor everything that a victim does on a device or a network
Trojan – A malware that pretends to be an authentic software but is malicious and its intent is to cause harm or damage.
Keylogger – A malware that monitors, records, and transmits all keystrokes typed in a particular device.
Adware – A malware that displays ads on your screen via browser pop ups
Malvertising – A malware that spreads through advertisement.
Spyware – A malware that gathers information on a person or an organization, and transmits it to the attacker without the victim’s consent.
Bot or Zombie Computer – a computer that is infected with a malware that allows it to be remotely controlled by a hacker
Botnet – a collection of bots primarily used for DDoS, ransomware, keylogging and other malware attacks
Denial of Service (DoS) – a cyber attack on networks, websites, and online resources to restrict access to legitimate users.
DDoS – Distributed Denial of Service. It is an attack that utilizes a botnet to overload a target server with requests and ultimately crashing it and making it inaccessible for genuine requests.
Backdoor – Commonly used to secure remote access to a computer, gain access to encrypted files by covertly bypassing authentication or encryption.
Social Engineering – Psychological manipulation of users to divulge confidential information or perform actions that undermine security.
Drive-by-Downloads – Unintended downloads of software with or without knowledge of the user.
Privilege Escalation – upgrading access to a resource or computer system after successfully penetrating a network by hacker.
Password Managers – Software that allows you to store, autofill, and auto-create passwords for all your online accounts. Efficient because you only need to remember one password and secure because all accounts will have different complex passwords.
Man in the middle attack – An attack in which a hacker captures your unencrypted internet traffic, modifies or reroutes the traffic to steal confidential information, or performs cybercrime.
Brute force attack – An automated password attack in which the hacker uses tools to guess your passwords. If your password contains only letters and numbers, it is easy to guess it within minutes.
Incident Response Plan – A plan that outlines exact procedures, staff responsibilities, and technical steps to take in the event of a security incident or breach. Steps include to identify a security incident or breach, contain the damage, contact the right people, inform the right organizations, legal counsel, and recover to normal business operations quickly.
Disaster Recovery Plan or Business Continuity Plan – A document that details how an organization will respond to unplanned incidents such as natural disasters, power outages, and a cyber attack.
Asset – user, infrastructure, information, records, computer devices that allow a company to conduct day to day operations and make up the entire IT landscape of the business.
Advanced Persistent Threat – A hacker that has sophisticated level of hacking expertise and significant resources and uses multiple attack vectors to penetrate a network or business
Attack Surface – The number of ways a hacker can enter a system and cause damage. The more number of assets a company has, the higher the attack surface.
Authentication – prove you are who you say you are
Authorization – Do you have the right to access the specific type of access to a particular resource?
Confidentiality – a property that the information is not disclosed to users, processes, or devices unless they have been authorized to access the information.
Integrity – That the content of the information or the data has not been modified or deleted.
Accessibility – A property that ensures that the IT resource, data, or an asset is accessible to the users that are trying to access it.
Event – A cybersecurity occurrence in an information system or network. Does not have to be malicious.
Incident – A cybersecurity event that potentially results in adverse consequences for an IT system or the information or the network
Data Breach – Unauthorized movement or disclosure of sensitive information to someone that is not authorized to access it.
Encryption – Encoding an information so that only an authorized person can read the contents of the information.
Decryption – The process of converting the encrypted data back to its original form.
Firewall – a software or hardware solution that analyzes and limits network traffic as per a set of rules.
Spoofing – Faking the sending email address or the website to dupe people into clicking on a link or transferring money to an account.
Principle of Least Privilege - A cybersecurity principle where you only allow access and authorization to an individual user that is required to do his job. Preventing higher privileges will mitigate the impact of any hack!
Zero Trust Model- Instead of assuming trust for all users inside a network, treat each access request as potentially malicious and verify the request for each resource it tries to access. Zero Trust runs on the philosophy of “Never trust, always verify.”
Privileged User - A user that is authorized (and, therefore, trusted) to perform security relevant functions that ordinary users are not authorized to perform.
Cybersecurity - The process of protecting information by preventing, detecting, and responding to attacks. Cybersecurity Event A cybersecurity change that may have an impact on organizational operations (including mission, capabilities, or reputation).
Other Cybersecurity Glossary for reference
NIST Cybersecurity Glossary: This glossary is made as per the NIST publications that have come out since its inception. Not all terms will be relevant, but you can still search for some specific Cybersecurity terms.
CyberWire: An independent Cybersecurity news service.
NICCS: National Initiative for Cybersecurity Careers and Studies
Cybrary: The leading Cybersecurity Professional Development Platform