Cybersecurity Glossary

Proprietary information is that information unique to a company and its ability to compete, such as customer lists, technical data, product costs, and trade secrets.

A protocol is a special set of rules that end points in a telecommunication connection when they communicate. Protocols specify interactions between the communicating entities. Protocols exist at several levels in a telecommunication connection.

The point-to-point tunneling protocol (PPTP) is an approach used to implement virtual private networks (VPN). PPTP uses a control channel over TCP and a GRE tunnel operating to encapsulate PPP packets.

A port scan is a sequence of messages sent by an attacker attempting to break into a computer. Port scanning provides the attacker an idea where to probe for weaknesses. A port scan consists of sending a message to each port, one at a time.

A packet is a unit of data that is routed between an origin and a destination on the internet or any other packet-switched network. When any file (such as e-mail message, HTML file, graphics interchange format file, uniform resource locator request) is sent from one place to another, the transmission control protocol (TCP) layer of TCP/IP divides the file into smaller chunks ideal for routing.

Perl is a family of high-level, general-purpose, dynamic programming languages. These languages include perl 5 and perl 6. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose unix scripting language.

Permutation is a technique that keeps the same letters but changes the position within a text to scramble the message.

Phishing is an attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by impersonating a trustworthy entity. Phishing emails may contain links to websites that are infected with malware. Phishing is typically carried out by email spoofing or instant messaging, and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one.

Password sniffing is a technique used to gain knowledge of passwords that involves monitoring traffic on a network to pull out information. There are several softwares available for automatic password sniffing.

A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of hardware, software, people, policies, and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. It enables users of an unsecured network to securely exchange data and money through the use of a public and a private cryptographic key pair that is obtained through a trusted authority. The public key infrastructure provides for a digital certificate that can identify an individual or an organization and directory services that can store and, when necessary, revoke the certificates.