Cybersecurity Glossary

At times called a fork bomb or rabbit virus, is a denial of service attack, that will continue to replicate itself until it consumes all of the system resources.

A type of computer attack, where the perpetrators target a particular group. The bad actor will work to gauge which websites the particular group will visit and infects those sites with malware hoping at least one member of the group falls victim to the attack.

Also known as a web beacon, is an embedded object in a web page or email that is used to track when content has been accessed and can help to create analytics. Web bugs are normally invisible to the user. Other names are also tracking bug, tag, or page tag.

a program used to restrict access to certain websites that could be deemed offensive or potentially harmful. Web content filtering software is used often by parents and corporations. Content filtering software can be programmed to look for certain word strings, and is mostly used to avoid pornographic websites.

An exploit kit that is considered a simplified, “doityourself” malware creator. Even a novice user could manage to create and send some malware that would be used to infect a computer. It contains all of the scripts needed to create the malware and send the spam emails used to lure potential victims to malicious websites.

a type of phishing campaign, but the target is only highprofile users like celebrities, executives, or wealthy users. Social engineering, email or content spoofing are used to try and gain personal or corporate information from the intended victim. Whaling email attempts and websites are much more personalized than your average phishing emails. Because of the added details, these type of attacks are much more difficult to identify as being malicious.

Also considered an ethical hacker. One who performs pen testing, or other hacking activities for the purpose of identifying vulnerabilities so an organization can protect themselves against potential black hat hackers, who exploit vulnerabilities with malicious intent.

A registry of entitled or accepted entities within a domain. Whitelisting is the opposite of blacklisting which is listing entities that should be denied or are unrecognized. In IT, there are email, application, network, or user whitelist. For email whitelists, a list of email addresses or IP addresses is created to identify who it is safe to receive email from. System administrators can create network whitelists to identify which mac addresses are allowed on the network. They can also create application whitelists which identify which applications or software are considered safe to operate within an environment. This is a useful approach in combating malware.

A type of selfreplicating malicious virus that is able to spread to various computers across a network. Worms exploit vulnerabilities to gain access. They cause damage by corrupting/modifying files or consuming systems resources limiting available bandwidth. Worms that are used cause harm to files are considered to have a payload. The payload is the malicious code used to corrupt, delete, alter, encrypt or exfiltrate files. Worms that are considered payload free are just used to consume resources. Worms that are used to encrypt files are used in ransomware attacks. Many current ransomware attacks used worms to gain network access. Spora is a recent worm that used USB drives to spread and encrypt files.