Cybersecurity Glossary

Behavioral monitoring involves recording system events and user activities and comparing them to security policies and baselines to evaluate compliance or detect violations. It includes tracking trends, setting thresholds, and defining responses to resolve conflicts, handle violations, prevent downtime, or improve capabilities.

A security mechanism prohibiting the execution of those programs on a known malicious or undesired list of software. The blacklist is a list of specific files known to be malicious or otherwise are unwanted. Any program on the list is prohibited from executing while any other program, whether benign or malicious, is allowed to execute by default. (See whitelist.)

A type of symmetric encryption algorithm that divides data into fixed length sections and then performs the encryption or decryption operation on each block. The action of dividing a data set into blocks enables the algorithm to encrypt data of any size.

A botnet is a group of computers that have been infected with malicious software allowing attackers to remotely control them. Botnets can be used for various illicit or criminal activities like spamming, eavesdropping, and performing DoS attacks.

An error or mistake in software coding or hardware design or construction. A bug represents a flaw or vulnerability in a system discoverable by attackers and used as point of compromise. Attacks often use fuzzing technique (i.e. randomize testing tools) to locate previously unknown bugs in order to craft new exploits.