Cybersecurity Glossary

A patch is a piece of software designed and created to update a computer program or its supporting data, to fix or improve it. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, usually called bug fixes. Each patch is created to improve the usability and/or performance of the system or application.

Protocol stacks are a set of network protocol layers that work together.

Partitioning is the division of a computer hard disk or other secondary storage into one or more regions. Many computers have hard disk drives with only a single partition but others have multiple partitions so that an OS can manage information in each region separately. Each partition then appears in the os as a distinct logical disk that uses part of the actual disk.

Pharming is defined as a cyber attack that is intended to redirect a website’s traffic to a masquerading website, which may be a fake one. Pharming is achieved by corrupting a dns server on the internet and steering a url to the masked website’s IP. Generally all users use a URL like www.worldbank.com instead of the real IP (192.86.99.140) of the website. The URL can be redirected to send traffic to the ip of the pseudo website by substituting the pointers on a dns server. The transactions can be imitated and information like login credentials can be gathered at the pseudo site. Using the information gathered, the attacker can access the real site and conduct transactions using the credentials of a valid user.

IANA has set aside three address ranges for use by private or non-internet connected networks. This is referred to as private address space and is defined in RFC 1918. The reserved address blocks are: 10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255 (10/8 prefix) 172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255 (172.16/12 prefix) 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255 (192.168/16 prefix).

Post office protocol, version 3 (POP3) is an internet standard protocol through which a client workstation can access a mailbox on a server host to retrieve mail messages that the server has received and is holding for the client.

Pretty good privacy (PGP)™ is a trademark data encryption and decryption program. This program provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. It was created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991. PGP is generally used for encrypting and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partitions and to increase the security of e-mail communications.

A payload is the actual application data a packet contains. It is part of the transmitted data which is the fundamental purpose of the transmission. In summary, payload refers to the actual intended message in a transmission.

Plaintext is the most portable format and is supported by almost every application. In cryptography, plaintext refers to any message that is not encrypted.

A preamble is a signal used in communications to synchronize the transmission timing between two or more systems. A preamble defines a specific series of transmission pulses that is understood by communicating systems. This ensures that systems receiving the information correctly interpret when the data transmission starts. The actual pulses used as a preamble vary depending on the network communication technology in use.