Intro
It’s convenient to name drop different types of cyber attacks at a party. I often struggle to name more than a few. I will try to maintain a running list of them.
But I find you cannot speak about cybersecurity unless you also have a basic understanding of information technology so I am including some of those terms as well.
As I write this I am painfully aware that you could simply ask ChatGPT to generate a list of all relevant terms in cybersecurity along with their definitions – at least I think you could – and come up with a much better and more complete list. But I refuse to go that route. These are terms I have personally come across so they have special significance for me personally. In other words, this list has been organically grown. For instance I plowed through a report by a major vendor specializing in reviewing other vendor’s offerings and it’s just incredible just how dense with jargon and acronyms each paragragh is: a motherlode of state-of-the-art tech jargon.
AiTM (Adversary in the Middle)
Baitortion
I guess an attack which has a bait such as a plum job offer combined with some kind of extortion? The usage was not 100% clear.
BYOVD (Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver)
Clickfix infection chain
Upon visiting compromised websites, victims are redirected to domains hosting fake popup windows that instruct them to paste a script into a PowerShell terminal to fix an issue.
Collision attack
I.e., against the MD5 hash algorithm as done in the Blast RADIUS exploit.
Credential Stuffing Attack
I.e., password re-use. Takes advantage of users re-using passwords for different applications. Nearly three of four consumers re-use password this way. Source: F5. Date: 3/2024
Data Wiper
Authentication Bypass
See for instance CVE-2024-0012
Evasion
Malicious software built to avoid detection by standard security tools.
Password spraying
A type of attack in which the threat actor tries the same password with multiple accounts, until one combination works.
Port Scan
Host Sweep
Supply Chain attack
Social Engineering
Hacking
Hacktivist
I suppose that would be an activitst who uses hacking to further their agenda.
Living off the land
Data Breach
Keylogger
Darknet
Captcha
Click farms
Jackpotting
This is one of my favorite terms. Imagine crooks implanted malware into an ATM and were able to convince it to dispense all its available cash to them on the spot! something like this actually happened. Scary.
Overlay Attack
Example: When you open a banking app on your phone, malware loads an HTML phishing page that’s designed to look just like that particular app and the malware’s page is overlaid on top.
Payment fraud attack
In a recent example, the victim experienced “multiple fraudulently induced outbound wire transfers to accounts controlled by unknown third parties.”
Skimmer
bot
Anti-bot, bot defense
Mitigation
SOC
Selenium (Se) or headless browser
Obfuscation
PII, Personally Identifiable Information
api service
Reverse proxy
Inline
endpoint, e.g., login, checkout
scraping
Layer 7
DDOS
Carpet bombing DDOS attack
Many sources hitting many targets within the same subnet. See:
SYN flood
DOS
Visibility
Automation
Token
Post
JavaScript
Replay
Browser Fingerprint
OS
Browser
GDPR
PCI DSS
AICPA Trust Services
Grandparent scam
A social engineering attack where scammers target grandparents by pretending to be a grandchild in a bind.
GUI
(JavaScript) Injection
Command Injection
Hotfix
SDK
URL
GET|POST Request
Method
RegEx
Virtual Server
TLS
Clear text
MTTR
RCA
SD-WAN
PoV
PoC
X-Forwarded-For
JSON
Client/server
Threat Intelligence
Use case
Carding attack
Source code
CEO Fraud
Phishing
Vishing
(Voice Phishing) A form of cyber-attack where scammers use phone calls to trick individuals into revealing sensitive information or performing certain actions.
Business email compromise (BEC)
Deepfake
Threat Intelligence
Social engineering
Cybercriminal
SIM box
Command and control (C2)
Typo squatting
Voice squatting
A technique similar to typo squatting, where Alexa and Google Home devices can be tricked into opening attacker-owned apps instead of legitimate ones.
North-South
East-West
Exfiltrate
Malware
Infostealer
Obfuscation
Antivirus
Payload
Sandbox
Control flow obfuscation
Buffer overflow
Use after free
Indicators of Compromise
AMSI (Windows Antimalware Scan Interface)
Polymorphic behavior
WebDAV
Protocol handler
Firewall
Security Service Edge (SSE)
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)
Zero Trust
Zero Trust is a security model that assumes that all users, devices, and applications are inherently untrustworthy and must be verified before being granted access to any resources or data.
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)
ZTA (Zero Trust Architecture)
Zero Trust Edge (ZTE)
Secure Web Gateway (SWG)
Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)
Remote Browser Isolation (RBI)
Content Disarm and Reconstruction (CDR)
Firewall as a service
Egress address
Data residency
Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Magic Quadrant
Managed Service Provider (MSP)
0-day or Zero day
User Experience (UX)
Watermark
DevOps
Multitenant
MSSP
Remote Access Trojan (RAT)
SOGU
2024. A remote access trojan.
IoC (Indicators of Compromise)
Object Linking and Embedding
(Powershell) dropper
Backdoor
Data Bouncing
A technique for data exfiltration that uses external, trusted web hosts to carry out DNS resolution for you
TTP (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures)
Infostealer
Shoulder surfing
Ransomware
Pig butchering
This is particularly disturbing to me because there is a human element, a foreign component, crypto currency, probably a type of slave trade, etc. See the Bloomberg Businessweek story about this.
Forensic analysis
Sitting Ducks
An entirely preventable DNS hijack exploit. See https://blogs.infoblox.com/threat-intelligence/who-knew-domain-hijacking-is-so-easy/
Attack vector
Attack surface
Economic espionage
Gap analysis
AAL (Authentication Assurance Level)
IAL (Identity Assurance Level)
CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management)
Trust level
Network perimeter
DMZ (Demilitarized zone)
Defense in depth
Lateral movement
Access policy
Micro segmentation
Least privilege
Privilege Escalation (PE)
Breach
Intrusion
Insider threat
Cache poisoning
I know it as DNS cache poisoning. If an attacker manages to fill the DNS resolver’s cache with records that have been altered or “poisoned.”
Verify explicitly
Network-based attack
Adaptive response
Telemetry
Analytics
Consuming entity
Behavior analysis
Authentication
Authorization
Real-time
Lifecycle management
Flat network
Inherent trust
Cloud native
Integrity
Confidentiality
Data encryption
EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response)
BSOD (Blue Screen of Death)
Everyone’s favorite Windows error!
BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik)
German Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik)
ICS (Industrial Control System)
Reverse shell
A text-based interfaces that allow for remote server control.
Crypto Miner
RCE (Remote Code Execution)
Threat Actor
APT (Advanced Persistent Threat)
Compromise
Vulnerability
Bug
Worm
Remote Access VPN (RAVPN)
XDR (Extended Detection and Response)
SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)
User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)
Path traversal vulnerability
An attacker can leverage path traversal sequences like “../” within a request to a vulnerable endpoint which ultimately allows access to sensitive files like /etc/shadow.
Tombstoning
Post-exploit persistence technique
Volumetric DDoS
MFA bomb
Bombard a user with notifications until they finally accept one.
Use-after-free (UAF)
A use-after-free vulnerability occurs when programmers do not manage dynamic memory allocation and deallocation properly in their programs.
Cold boot attack
A cold boot attack focuses on RAM and the fact that it is readable for a short while after a power cycle.
Random Prefix Attack
A type of DNS attack. https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/dns-firewall/random-prefix-attacks/
Famous named attacks
Agent Tesla
Cloudbleed
Heartbleed
log4j
Morris Worm
Explanations of exploits
Famous attackers
APT29 (Cozy Bear)
A Russia-nexus threat actor often in the news
Volt Typhoon
2024. A China-nexus threat actor
IT terminology
2FA (2 Factor Authentication)
802.1x
ACL (Access Control List)
AD (Active Directory)
ADO (Azue DevOps)
AFK (Away From Keyboard)
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
AGI is the theory and development of computer systems that can act rationally.
ANN (Artificial Neural Network)
Ansible
I would call it an open source orchestrator.
anti-aliasing
When you smooth out color in neighboring pixels.
anycast
apache
A formerly popular open source web server which became bloated with features.
APM (Application Performance Management)
ARIN
ARM
A processor architecture from ARM Corporation, as opposed to, e.g., x86. Raspberry Pis use ARM. I think Androids do as well.
ARP (Address Resolution Protocol)
ASN (Autonomous System Number)
Each AS is assigned an autonomous system number, for use in Border Gateway Protocol routing
ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation One)
A standard interface description language (IDL) for defining data structures that can be serialized and deserialized in a cross-platform way.
ASPA (Autonomous System Provider Authorization)
An add-on to RPKI that allows an ASN to create a record that lists which ASNs can be providers for that ASN. The concepts are “customer” (an ASN) and “providers” (a list of ASNs). This is used to do hop by hop checking of AS paths.
ASR (Aggregation Services Router)
A high-end Interent router offered by Cisco for business customers.
AV (anti-virus)
AWS (Amazon Web Services)
Azure AD
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
Blast Radius
One of those dreadully overused terms borrowed from the military that mostly only marketing people like to throw around. It means what you think it might mean.
Blue Team – see Red Team
BOM (Bill of Material)
Boot start
A flag for a driver in Windows that tells it to always start on boot.
broadcast
Browser
BSI (The German Federal Office for Information Security)
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
I.e., when employees are permitted to use their personal smartphone to conduct company business.
BYOL (Bring Your Own License)
F5 permits this approach to licensing one of their cloud appliances.
CA (Certificate Authority)
CDN (Content Distribution Network)
CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol)
This protocol allows devices connected to switch ports to learn what switch and which switch port they are connected to. It is a layer 2 protocol.
CGN (Carrier Grade NAT)
The address space 100.64.0.0/10 is handled specially by ISPs for CGN. RFC 6598
CHAP
Chatbot
A computer program that simulates human conversation with and end user.
CI (Configuration Item)
CI/CD
An ITIL term referring to the object upon which changes are made.
CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency)
CISO (Chief Information Security Officer)
CMDB (Configuration Management Database)
CMO (Current Mode of Operations)
CNN (Congruential Neural Network)
Computer Vision
A field of AI that leverages machine learning and neutral networks to enable machines to identify and understand visual information such as images and videos.
CPE (Customer Premise Equipment)
CSR (Certificate Signing Request)
CUPS (Common Unix Printing Systems)
Customer Edge (CE)
CVE
CVEs, or Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, are a maintained list of vulnerabilities and exploits in computer systems. These exploits can affect anything, from phones to PCs to servers or software. Once a vulnerability is made public, it’s given a name in the format CVE–. There are also scoring systems for CVEs, like the CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System), which assigns a score based on a series of categories, such as how easy the vulnerability is to exploit, whether any prior access or authentication is required, as well as the impact the exploit could have.
CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System)
Part of CVE lingo.
DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing)
Data at rest
Data in motion
Data Plane
A physical security appliance separates data traffic from its management traffic, which transits the managemenbt plane.
Data Remanence
The residual representation of data that remains even after attempting to erase or initialize RAM.
DDI (DNS, DHCP and IP address management)
Deep Learning
A subset of machine learningthat focus on using deep neural networks with multiple layers to model complex patterns in data.
Deepfake
A manipulated video or other digital representation produced by sophisticated machine-learning techniquies that yield seemingly realistic, but fabricated images and sounds.
DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol)
DLL
DLP (Data Loss Prevention)
DNS (Domain Name System)
DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions)
Docker
DoH (DNS over HTTPS)
Domain
DRM (Digital Rights Management)
EAP
East-West
Data movement with a data center, I believe, as oppose to North-South.
EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization)
Hey, an IT person needs to know some business terminology!
Eduroam
Enhanced Factory Reset (EFR)
Entra
From Microsoft. The new name for Azure AD
EU AI Act
EULA (End User Licnese Agreement)
Exact Data Matching (EDM)
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
FEX (Fabric Extender)
FIFO (First in, First Out)
FMO (Future Mode of Operation)
As opposed to CMO.
FN (False Negative)
Forensics
FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)
FP (False Positive)
Fritz!Box
A popular home router in Germany.
GA (General Availability)
GBIC
A type of fiber optic transceiver that converts electric signals to optical signals.
GCP (Google Cloud Provider)
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
An EU directive to achieve data privacy.
Generative AI
AI which can create new human-quality content, including text, images, audio or video.
GMT – see UTC
GRE
GSLB (global Server Load Balancing)
GUI (Graphical User Interface)
HA (High Availability)
Hallucination
When an LLM perceives patterns that are non-existent creating nonsensical or inaccurate outputs.
Hands and Eyes
When you don’t have physical access to a server, you need someone who does to be this for you.
HIBP (Have I Been Pwned)
HPC (High Performance Computing)
HSM (Hardware Security Module)
HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
I started with version 0.9!
Hypervisor
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
E.g., brining up a VM on AWS.
IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority)
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names)
ICS
IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
IdP (Identity Provider)
IDS (Intrusion Detection System)
Incident Response Team
Variations include: Computer emergency Response team, Security incident Response Team, etc.
IPAM (IP Address Management)
IPI (IP Intelligence)
At least in the world of F5 this means IP Intelligence, i.e., the reputation of a given IP address.
IPS (Intrusion Prevention System)
IPSEC
IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6)
ISO 9001
ISP (Internet Service Provider)
ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library)
Kanban
Agile way of tracking progress on tasks and brief meetings.
Kerning
Adjusting the spacing between letyters in a proportional font.
Kernel mode
Kubernetes
L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol)
L3, L4, L7 (Layer 3, Layer 4, Layer 7)
Refers to ISO 7-layer traffic model.
LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP)
An application stack which gives a server needed software to do “interesting things.”
LaTEX
A markup language based on TEX I used to use to write a scientific paper. I think it gets transformed into a DVI, and then into a postscript file.
LEC (Local Exchange Carrier)
LLD (Low Level Design)
LLD (Low Level Discovery)
A command-line browser for unix systems.
LLDP (Link layer Discovery Protocol)
See also CDP
LACP (Link Access Control Protocol)
Link
Linux
An open source OS similar to Unix.
LLM (Large Langiuage Model)
lynx
A command-line browser for linux systems.
MAC (Media Access Control) Address
Layer 2 address of a device, e.g., fa-2f-36-b4-8c-f5
Machine Learning
A subfield of AI that deals with creating systems that can learn from data and improve their performance without explicit programming.
Management Plane
See Data Plane.
Mandiant
MD5 (Message Digest 5)
MDM (Mobile Device Management)
Management software used to administer smartphones and tablets.
MFA (Multi Factor Authentication)
MITRE ATT&CK
Modbus protocol
MS-CHAPv2
MSS (Maximum Segment Size)
Set by a TCP option in the beginning of the communcation.
MTU (Maximum transmission unit)
Often 1500 bytes.
multicast
Named pipes
I read it’s a Windows thing. huh. Hardly. It’s been on unix systems long before it was a twinkle in the eye of Bill gates. It acts like a pipe (|) except you give it a name in the filesystem and so it is a special file type. It’s used for inter-process communication.
NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement)
.NET
NGFW (Next Generation FireWall)
Palo Alto Networks describes their firewalls this way.
NGINX
A web server that is usually superioir to apache for most applications.
NLP (Natural Language Processing)
A branch of AI that uses machine learning to enable computers to understand, interpret, and respond to human language.
NOC (Network Operations Center)
North-South
Data movement from/to the data center. Also see East-West.
NSA (National Security Agency)
OAuth bearer token
A security token with the property that any party in possession of the token (a “bearer“) can use the token in any way that any other party in possession of it can.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
Offensive Security – see Red Team
OpenRoaming
openssl
A common open source implementation of SSL/TLS.
OS (Operating System)
OSFP (Open Shortest Path First)
OSS (Open Source Software)
OT (Operational Technology)
OWASP (Open Worldwide Application Security Project)
An online community that produces freely available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the fields of IoT, system software and web application security.
PAP
Patch
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
PBR (Policy Based Routing)
PDF (Portable Document File)
PDU (Protocol Data Unit)
PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail)
The format certificates are normally stored in.
PII (Personally Identifiable Information)
PKCS (Public Key Cryptography Standard)
PKI (Public Key Infrastructure)
PLC (programmable logic controller)
PM (Product Manager)
Could also be Project Manager but for me it usually means Product Manager.
PO (Purchase Order)
POC (Point of Contact)
POC (Proof of Concept)
Port Channel
Portable Executable (PE)
POV (Proof of Value)
Private Cloud
Prompt Engineering
The practice of crafting effective prompts that elicit high-quality answers from generative AI tools.
PS (PostScript)
A file type I used to use. It is a vector-oriented language, stack-based, which tells the printer how to move its ink pens around the page. Before there was PDF, there was postscript.
PS (PowerShell)
A versatile scripting language developed by Microsoft and available on all Windows computers.
PTO (Paid Time Off)
Purple Team
Purple teams combine red team and blue team functions. See Red Team.
Python
A popular programming language, not the snake.
QSFP (Quad Small Form factor Pluggable)
A newer kind of SFP.
Rack Unit
RADIUS
RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
A method to train LLMs.
Ray
An open-source unified compute framework used by the likes of OpenAI, Uber, and Amazon which simplifies the scaling of AI and Python workloads, including everything from reinforcement learning and deep learning to tuning and model serving.
RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol)
Red Team
In a red team/blue team exercise, the red team is made up of offensive security experts who try to attack an organization’s cybersecurity defenses.
Redirect
Remediation
Addressing a security flaw.
Remote Desktop Licensing (RDL) services
Often deployed on Windows severs with Remote Desktop Services deployed.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Reverse Proxy
A TCP gateway which terminates a tcp connection and maintains a separate tcp connection to a back-end server.
RFC (Request for Comment)
RFI (Requst for Information)
RFO (Reason for Outage)
RFP (Request for Proposal)
RFQ (Request for Quote)
RIPE
RIR (Regional Internet Registry)
RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization)
You hear this a lot when It guys need to get a replacement for failed equipment.
ROA (Route Origin Authorization)
ROCE (Return on Capital Employed)
Hey, an IT person has to know a few business terms!
RPKI (Resource Public key Infrastructure)
Provides a way to connect Internet number resource information to a trust anchor.
RPi (Raspberry Pi)
A popular small, inexpensive server aimed at the educational crowd.
RPZ (Response Policy Zone)
A concept in DNS for either a DNS firewall or way to overwrite DNS responses.
RR (Resource Record)
RSA
Asymmetric encryption standard named after its creators, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman.
RTFM (Read The “flippin'” Manual)
SaaS (Software as a Service)
SAML
SANS
Private outfit in the US which specializes in information security and cybersecurity training.
Sans-Serif
A font type which does not have the fancy rounded blobs at the tips of the letter, such as Helvetica.
SASE (Secure Access Service Edge)
SCADA
SDWAN (Software defined WAN)
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SFP (Small Form factor Pluggable)
A type of optic transceiver that converts electric signals to optical signals.
SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)
If you ask the French they proudly point to this as the predeccesor to the more widely known HTML.
SFTP (Secure file Transfer Protocol)
SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm)
SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)
SRE (Site Reliability Engineer)
SMTP (Secure Mail Transfer Protocol)
SNI (Server Name Indication or similar, I think)
When multiple HTTP[S web sites whare a single IP this technology can be used to identify which certificate to send to a requester.
Spoofing
When a source IP address is faked.
SSH
SSL (Secure Socket Layer)
SOC (System on a Chip)
I believe the RPi is described to be this.
SOC (Security Operations Center)
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
SSL labs
A Qualys (so you know it has to be good quality) service where you can test a web site’s SSL certificate.
SSO (Single Sign On)
Steal with Pride
To unashamedly build on someone else’s work.
SVI (Switch virtual Interface)
A layer 3 on-switch routing between vlans on that switch. It’s a Cisco thing.
TAC (Technical Account or something?)
TAM (Technical Account Manager)
Another Cisco term.
Cisco uses this term a lot.
TCP (Transport Control Protocol)
Telnet
Terraform
The epoch
The first moment of January 1st, 1970
TI (Threat Intelligence)
TLP (Traffic Light Protocol)
TLS (Transport Layer Security)
udev rules
udev rules in Linux are used to manage device nodes in the /dev directory. Those nodes are created and removed every time a user connects or disconnects a device.
UI5
SAP’s UI for HTML 5.
Unit testing
UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply)
URL
UTC (Universal Time Coordinated)
What used to be called GMT.
VLAN
VM (Virtual Machine)
VMWare
Will Broadcom destroy this company the way they did to Bluecoat/Symantec?
VNC (Virtual Networking Computer)
VNC is a software used to remotely control a computer.
VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
vPC (Virtual Port Channel)
A virtual port channel (vPC) allows links that are physically connected to two different Cisco FEXes to appear as a single port channel by a third device.
VPN – Virtual Private Network
WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Webhook
Website
Wiki
A less formal and usually more collaborative approach to documentation, the prime example being Wikipedia.
Windows PE or Win PE
A small OS for repairing or restoring Windows systems.
WWW (World Wide Web)
x86
A type of processor architecture. Found in most Windows PCs.