📑Glossary

Adware

Annoying software that shows ads to computer users.

ARM poisoning

Powerful attack you can use to intercept traffic on a switched network. This operation lets the hacker sniff traffic between the poisoned hosts even if the machines sit on a switched network. An attacker could also change the content of the packets.

Bootkit

Rootkits which circumvent OS protection mechanisms by executing during the bootstrap phase.

Bots

Small pieces of software that get installed on millions of machines to perform DoS, and remotely commanded by a C&C server.

CAM

Content Addressable Memory

Dialer

Tries to dial numbers on dial-up connections in order to collect money from the victim's phone bill, nowadays targeting smartphones.

DoS

Denial of Service.

Egress Filtering

Practice of monitoring and potentially restricting the flow of information outbound from one network to another. Typically it is information from a private TCP/IP computer network to the Internet that is controlled.

Greyware

Either spyware, adware or both.

Hoax

It is a deliberately fabricated falsehood made to masquerade as truth. It is distinguishable from errors in observation or judgment, or rumors, urban legends, pseudosciences or April Fools' Day events that are passed along in good faith by believers or as jokes.

Keylogger

Special software that records every keystroke on the remote victim machine, window names and sends logs to a server controlled by the attacker. There are basically two types: Hardware keyloggers and Rootkit keyloggers (stealthy and more invisible to the victim user than software keyloggers, hijacks the OS APIs to record keystrokes, intercepting the interrupt tables from the OS).

Malware

Any software used to misuse computer systems with the intent to cause a DoS, spy on users activity, get unauthorized control over one or more computer systems, etc.

Password Cracking

Process of recovering clear-text passwords starting from their hash, where the attacker tries to guess the password.

Packet

Stream of bits running as electric signals on physical media used for data transmission (wire/LAN, WiFi). Every packet has header (ensures receiver can interpret payload and handle the communication) and a payload (with the actual information).

Privileges

Identify actions a user is allowed to do.

Ransomware

Encrypts a computer or smartphone with a secret key and asks its victim for a ransom.

Remote Code Execution

Malicious user manages to execute some attacker-controlled code on a victim remote machine.

Rootkit

Designed to hide itself from users and antivirus programs in order to subvert the OS functioning, maintaining privileged access to the victim without being noticed.

Security through Obscurity

Secrecy of design to provide security.

ShellCode

Piece of custom code which provides the attacker a shell on the victim machine.

Spyware

Collects info about user's activity (OS, visited websites, passwords).

Trojan Horse

Comes embedded in seemingly harmless file, being backdoors the most common.

Virus

Small piece of code that spreads from computer to computer without any direct action or authorization by the owners of the infected machines, normally copying themselves to special sections of the HDD or inside legitimate programs or documents, running every time an infected program or file is opened.

Worms

Spread over the network by exploiting OS and SW vulnerabilities, exploiting credentials or misconfigurations to attack a service or a machine, usually worms are part of other software and they offer an entry point into the target system.

XSS

XSS is a vulnerability that lets an attacker control some of the content of a web application. XSS vulnerabilities happen when a web application uses unfiltered user input to build the output content displayed to its end users, letting an attacker control the output HTML and JS code, targeting the app's users (admin is included). XSS involves injecting malicious code into the output of a webpage, this malicious code is the rendered (or executed) by the browser of the visiting users.