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ForumGLOSSARY OF COMPUTER SECURITY
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1. Alert: Notification that a specific attack has been directed at the information system of an organization.
2. Apple Talk: Apple networking protocol with data-transfer rate of 230 Kbits per second.
3. ATA: Acronym for AT Attachment. There are multiple levels of ATA standards including the base-level 16-bit IDE, ATA-2 (Enhanced IDE) and Ultra ATA.
4. ATAPI: ATA Packet Interface. Defines a set of commands supported through the ATA-2 interface for peripherals other than hard drives, such as CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, and tape drives.
5. Attack: Intentional act of attempting to bypass one or more computer security controls.
6. Authenticate: To verify the identity of a user, user device, or other entity, or the integrity of data stored, transmitted, or otherwise exposed to unauthorized modification in an information system, or to establish the validity of a transmission.
7. Average Seek Time: The average time it takes for the read/write head to move to a specific location. To compute the average seek time, divide the time it takes to complete a large number of random seeks by the number of seeks performed.
8. Back Door: Hidden software or hardware mechanism used to circumvent security controls. Synonymous with trap door.
9. Bad Block: A block (usually the size of a sector) that cannot reliably hold data because of a media flaw or damaged format markings.
10. BIOS: This is the acronym for Basic Input/Output System. Your BIOS runs at startup, configures devices, and then boots the operating system. Because the BIOS is so integral to getting your computer started, it's stored on a separate ROM chip, not your hard drive, to isolate it from crashes.
11. BIT: Abbreviation for binary digit. A binary digit may have one of two values - 1 or 0. This contrasts with a decimal digit, which may have a value from 0 to 9. A bit is one of the logic 1 or logic 0 binary settings that make up a byte of data.
12. Browser: Short for "Web browser," this software application can locate and display Web pages. The two most popular browsers are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Both of these are graphical browsers, which means that they can display graphics as well as text.
13. Buffer: An area of RAM reserved for temporary storage of data that is waiting to be sent to a device.
14. Buffer Under Run: Occurs when the system cannot keep up a steady data stream to the CD recording software. The CD recorder itself has a buffer that is constantly filled with data in the event of a system slowdown or interruption. If the buffer is emptied before the system can recover, a buffer under-run occurs.
15. Cache: Specialized RAM used to optimize data transfers between system elements with different performance characteristics.
16. Campus-Area Network (CAN): The computers are within a limited geographic area, such as a campus or military base.
17. CDR: An acronym for recordable CD technology whose media can be written to and erased approximately 1,000 times before failure. Standard 74min CD-RW media can hold up to 500MB when formatted for fixed-length packet writing.
18. Central Processing Unit (CPU): The CPU is the brains of the computer. Sometimes referred to as the processor or central processor, the CPU is where most calculations take place.
19. Cipher Text: Data that has been encrypted. Cipher text is unreadable until it has been converted into plain text (decrypted) with a key.
20. Circuit Board: Sometimes abbreviated as PCB or printed circuit board, a circuit board is a thin plate on which chips and other electronic components are placed. Computers consist of one or more boards, often called cards or adapters.
21. Clean Room: An environmentally controlled dust-free assembly or repair facility in which hard disk drives are assembled or can be opened for internal servicing.
22. Computer Forensics: The application of computer investigation and analysis techniques to determine potential legal evidence.
23. Cookie: A cookie is a message given to a Web browser by a Web server. Cookies are used to identify users and can possibly be used to prepared Customized Web pages for them. Cookies can not spread viruses, nor can they access the hard drive.
24. Countermeasures: Action, device, procedure, technique or other measure that reduces the vulnerability of an information system.
25. CRC: Acronym for Cyclic Redundancy Check. Short for cyclic redundancy check, a common technique for detecting data transmission errors. Transmitted messages are divided into predetermined lengths that are divided by a fixed divisor. According to the calculation, the remainder number is appended onto and sent with the message. When the message is received, the computer recalculates the remainder and compares it to the transmitted remainder. If the numbers do not match, an error is detected.
26. Cylinder: The cylindrical surface formed by identical track numbers on vertically stacked discs. At any location of the head positioning arm, all tracks under all heads are the cylinder. The cylinder number is one of the three address components required to find a specific address. The other two are head number and sector number.
27. Data Driven Attack: A form of attack that is encoded in seemingly innocuous data which is executed by a user or a process to implement an attack. A data driven attack is a concern for firewalls, since it may get through the firewall in data form and launch an attack against a system behind the firewall.
28. Dedicated Servo: A technology in which timing or positioning signals are located on a dedicated disk containing no user data. These signals provide the information the actuator needs to fine-tune the position of the read/write heads.
29. Delete: To remove or erase, e.g. deleting a character means removing it from a file or erasing it from the display screen or a disk. A common misconception when deleting files is that they are also removed from the hard drive. However, data can still be retrieved from the hard drive even after the files have been deleted. The only way to completely erase a file with no trace is to overwrite the data.
30. Denial of Service: Result of any action or series of actions that prevents any part of an information system from functioning.
31. Dictionary attack: An attack that uses a brute-force technique of successively trying all the words in some large, exhaustive list.
32. Digital Storage Media: An electronic device, or the media that fits into an electronic device, that stores bits of digital information otherwise known as "data." Many electronic devices fit into this category including laptops, personal computers, computer networks, cellular phones, personal digital assistants (aka Palm Pilots), MP3 players, CD players, video cameras, and digital cameras.
33. Digital Tape: Relatively inexpensive and can have very large storage capacities, but they do not permit random access of data. Video cameras can record several hours of live full-motion video on a single tape. Tapes are also used on computer systems to backup entire workstations or servers and vary in capacity from 2GB to 40GB.
34. Distributed Tool: A tool that can be distributed to multiple hosts, which can then be coordinated to anonymously perform an attack on the target host simultaneously after some time delay.
35. DNS Spoofing: Assuming the DNS name of another system by either corrupting the name service cache of a victim system, or by compromising a domain name server for a valid domain.
36. Download: To copy data (usually an entire file) from a main source to a peripheral device. The term is often used to describe the process of copying a file from an online service or bulletin board service to one's own computer. Downloading can also refer to copying a file from a network file server to a computer on the network.
37. ECC: Acronym for Error Correction Code. The incorporation of extra parity bits in transmitted data in order to detect errors that can be corrected by the controller.
38. Embedded Servo: A method of using the space between sectors (intersector gaps) on each data surface of a disc drive to provide servo-positioning information. This method uses the same head to read both servo and data information, allowing all surfaces to be used for data storage.
39. Encryption: The translation of data into a secret code. Encryption is the most effective way to achieve data security. To read an encrypted file, you must have access to a secret key or password that enables you to decrypt it. Unencrypted data is called plain text; encrypted data is referred to as cipher text.
40. File Allocation Table: The operating systems use FAT to keep track of which clusters are allocated to which files and which are available for use.
41. Firewall: A firewall is a hardware or software solution to enforce security policies. In the physical security analogy, a firewall is equivalent to a door lock on a perimeter door or on a door to a room inside of the building - it permits only authorized users such as those with a key or access card to enter. A firewall has built-in filters that can disallow unauthorized or potentially dangerous material from entering the system. It also logs attempted intrusions.
42. Flooding: Type of incident involving insertion of a large volume of data resulting in denial of service.
43. Floppy disks: Relatively slow and have a small capacity, but they are portable, inexpensive, and universal. Floppy disks can retain up to 1.4MB of data.
44. Flying Height: The distance between the read/write head and the disk surface, made up of a cushion of air that keeps the head from contacting the media.
45. Gigabyte: A unit of measure consisting of one billion bytes (one thousand megabytes).
46. Hacker: Unauthorized user who attempts to or gains access to an information system.
47. Hard disks: Very fast and with more capacity than floppy disks, but also more expensive. Some hard disk systems are portable (removable cartridges), but most are not. Current hard disk capacities vary from 10GB to +100GB.
48. HDA: Acronym for head disk assembly, typically a sealed unit.
49. Head: The tiny electromagnetic coil and metal pole used to create and read back the magnetic patterns on the disk. Also known as the read/write head.
50. Head Crash: Damage to a read/ write head and magnetic media, usually caused by sudden contact of the heads with the disk surface. Head crash also can be caused by dust and other contamination inside the HDA.
51. High Level Formatting: Formatting performed by the operating system's format program (for example, the DOS FORMAT program). Among other things, the formatting program creates the root directory, file allocation tables, and other basic configurations.
52. Home-Area Network (HAN): A network contained within a user's home that connects a person's digital devices.
53. Internet: The Internet is a massive network of networks or a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.
54. Intrusion: Unauthorized act of bypassing the security mechanisms of a system.
55. IP Address: A name for a computer device on a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/Internet Protocol (IP) network. The TCP/IP is built into the operating system, and it is how data is transmitted from the Internet to the user.
56. Jumper: A tiny connector box that slips over two pins that protrude from a circuit board. The jumper can be moved to change electrical connectors. When in place, the jumper connects the pins electrically.
57. Kilobyte: A unit of measure consisting of 1,024 bytes.
58. Landing Zone: A non-data area on the disk's inner cylinder where the heads can rest when the power is off.
59. Local-Area Network (LAN): A computer network that spans a relatively small area. For example, most LANs are confined to a single building or group of buildings.
60. Low Level Format: The first step in preparing a drive to store information after physical installation is complete. The process sets up the handshake between the drive and the controller.
61. Malicious Code: Software capable of performing an unauthorized process on an information system.
62. Media: Objects on which data can be stored. These include hard disks, floppy disks, CD-ROMS and tapes. In computer networks, media refers to the cables linking workstations together.
63. Megabyte: A unit of measurement equal to 1 million bytes or 1,024 kilobytes or 1,048,576 bytes
64. Megahertz: A measurement of frequency in millions of cycles per second.
65. Memory Sticks: This is a relatively new form of digital storage that works with a wide variety of consumer electronic devices including: digital cameras, digital video cameras, and Sony MP3 audio recorder. These memory cards are extremely compact (approx. 1" x 2") and come in various storage capacities from 16MB to 128 MB.
66. Metropolitan-Area Network (MAN): A data network designed for a town or city.
67. Mirroring: A popular term for RAID-1. A method of creating disc-fault tolerance by redundantly storing information on a pair of drives.
68. Mobile Code: Software modules obtained from remote systems, transferred across a network, and then downloaded and executed on a local system without explicit installation or execution by the recipient. Malicious mobile code is designed, employed, distributed, or activated with the intention of compromising the performance or security of information systems and computers, increasing access to those systems, disclosing unauthorized information, corrupting information, denying service, or stealing resources.
69. MTBF: MTBF (mean time between failures) is a measure of how reliable a hardware product or component is. For most components, the measure is typically in thousands or even tens of thousands of hours between failures.
70. Network: A group of two or more computer systems that are linked together.
71. Operating System: A program which acts as an interface between the user of a computer and the computer hardware. The purpose of the operating system is to provide an environment in which a user may run software applications. The goal of the operating system is to enable the user to conveniently use the computer's resources such as the CPU, memory, storage devices and printers.
72. Optical disks (CD-ROMs, Mini CDs, DVD): Unlike floppy and hard disks, which use electromagnetism to encode data, optical disk systems use a laser to read and write data. Optical disks have very large storage capacity, but they are not as fast as hard disks. The most common form of optical disk that you will encounter is the CD-ROM. The most common variety of CD can store up to 650MB (megabytes) or 74 minutes of audio recording time. A single CD-ROM has the storage capacity of 460 floppy disks, enough memory to store about 300,000 text pages. CD-ROMs are particularly well-suited to information that requires large storage capacity. This includes color large software applications, graphics, sound, and especially video. DVD disks are also commercially available at this time and can be used to record up to 4.7GB of video data on a disk that is the same size/shape of a traditional CD. Mini CDs are available that generally store 21 minutes of audio, or 50MB of data on a small surface roughly the size of a business card.
73. Packet: A block of data sent over the network transmitting the identities of the sending and receiving stations, error-control information, and message.
74. Packet Filtering: A feature incorporated into routers to limit the flow of information based on pre-determined communications such as source, destination, or type of service being provided by the network. Packet filters let the administrator limit protocol specific traffic to one network segment, isolate email domains, and perform many other traffic control functions.
75. Packet Sniffer: A device or program that monitors the data traveling between computers on a network.
76. Partitioning: Method for creating a logical file structure that the operating system can access. Method for dividing an area on the disc drive for use by more than one disc operating system, or for dividing large disc drives into areas which the file allocation table (FAT) can deal with when in use.
77. Password: A secret series of characters that enable a user to access a file, computer or program. The password helps ensure that unauthorized users do not access the computers. Ideally, the password should be something that nobody cold guess. In practice, most people choose a password that is easy to remember such as their name or their initials. This may be why it is relatively easy to break into most computer systems.
78. Platter: A disk made of metal (or other rigid material) that is mounted inside a fixed disk drive. Most drives use more than one platter mounted on a single spindle (shaft) to provide more data storage surfaces in a smaller area.
79. Probe: An attempt to gather information about an information system for the apparent purpose of circumventing its security controls.
80. Protocols: The rules and encoding specifications for sending data.
81. Proxy: Software agent that performs a function or operation on behalf of another application or system while hiding the details involved.
82. Raid: RAID (redundant array of independent discs) is a concept in storage subsystems that can deliver higher levels of protection against down-time and data loss than conventional disc drives. RAID refers to a drive architecture designed to safeguard critical data through redundancy. In theory, RAID arrays composed of conventional discs can function for hundreds or even thousands of years without losing data because of a disc failure. RAID also offers other benefits: it can improve input/output performance, make servicing simpler and quicker and allow users to fine-tune the drive system to match the needs of specific applications.
83. Replicator: Any program that acts to produce copies of itself. Examples include; a program, a worm, or virus.
84. Retro-virus: A retro-virus is a virus that waits until all possible backup media are infected too, so that it is not possible to restore the system to an uninfected state.
85. RLL: Acronym for run length limited. A method used on some hard disks to encode data into magnetic pulses. RLL requires more processing, but stores almost 50 percent more data per disk than the older MFM (modified frequency modulation) method.
86. Rootkit: A hacker security tool that captures passwords and message traffic to and from a computer. A collection of tools that allows a hacker to provide a backdoor into a system, collect information on other systems on the network, mask the fact that the system is compromised, and much more. Rootkit is a classic example of Trojan Horse software. Rootkit is available for a wide range of operating systems.
87. Sector: A sector is a section of track whose size is determined by formatting. When used as an address component, sector and location refer to the sequence number of the sector around the track. Typically, one sector stores one user record of data. Determining how many sectors per track to use is dependent on the system type, the controller capabilities, and the drive encoding method and interface.
88. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): A protocol developed by Netscape for transmitting private documents via the Internet. SSL works by using a public key to encrypt data that is transferred over the SSL connection. Both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer support SSL, and many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information such as credit card numbers.
89. Server: A computer or device on a network that manages network resources. For example, a file server is a computer and storage device dedicated to storing files. Any user on the network can store files on the server. A print server is a computer that manages one or more printers, and a network server is a computer that manages network traffic. A database server is a computer system that processes database queries. Servers are often dedicated, meaning that they perform no other tasks besides their server tasks. On multiprocessing operating systems, however, a single computer can execute several programs at once. A server in this case could refer to the program that is managing resources rather than the entire computer.
90. Smurfing: Software that mounts a denial of service attack by exploiting IP broadcast addressing and ICMP ping packets to cause flooding.
91. Software: Anything that can be stored electronically is software. Software exists as ideas, concepts, and symbols, and is often divided into two categories: Systems Software - This includes the operating system and all the utilities that enable the computer to function. Applications Software - Includes programs that do real work for users, e.g. word processors, spreadsheets and database management systems fall under this category.
92. Spam: To indiscriminately send unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant, or inappropriate messages, especially commercial advertising in mass quantities. Noun: electronic "junk mail".
93. Spindle: The drive's center shaft, on which the hard disk platters are mounted.
94. Spoofing: Unauthorized use of legitimate identification and authentication data, however it was obtained, to mimic a subject different from the attacker. Impersonating, masquerading, piggybacking, and mimicking are forms of spoofing.
95. Terabyte: A Terabyte = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes (or approximately one trillion bytes). A terabyte is equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes or 1,000,000 megabytes.
96. Text File: A file that holds text (word, sentences, paragraphs) and is usually stored as ASCII code. Most computers use ASCII codes to represent text which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to another. Objects that are not text include graphics, numbers and program code.
97. Threat: Any circumstance or event with the potential to adversely impact an information system through unauthorized access, destruction, disclosure, modification of data, and/or denial of service.
98. Ultra ATA/100: Ultra ATA/100 or Ultra DMA/100 is an extension of the current Ultra ATA/66 interface. This new high-speed interface has the capability of 100 Mbytes/sec transfer rate and maximized disk performance under the current PCI local bus environment.
99. Upload: To copy a file from your own computer to another computer.
100. Virus: Self-replicating, malicious code that attaches itself to an application program or other executable system component and leaves no obvious signs of its presence.
101. Vulnerability: Weakness in an information system, system security procedures, internal controls, or implementation that could be exploited.
102. Wide-Area Network (WAN): A LAN that is connected to other LANs over any distance via telephone lines and radio waves.
103. Winchester Disks: Former code name for an early IBM hard disk model. Sometimes still used to refer to hard drives in general.
104. World Wide Web: The Web is not the Internet, but it is related to it. The Web is actually a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet.
105. Worm: Independent program that replicates from machine to machine across network connections often clogging networks and information systems as it spreads.
106. Zip drive: A high-capacity floppy disk drive developed by Iomega ®. Zip disks are slightly larger than conventional floppy disks, and about twice as thick. They can hold 100, 250, or 750 MB of data. Because they're relatively inexpensive and durable, they have become a popular media for backing up hard disks and for transporting large files.
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