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APT is an Advanced Persistent Threat. A Threat Actor [usually a group of hackers] are a group of attackers who gain unauthorized access and remains undetected for an extended period of time. These are usually political, economic, military, or commercial in nature.
Compliancy ensures that controls are in place to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility of data while stored, processed and transferred by ensuring that any and all vulnerabilities and risks are managed.
Exploit is an attack on a computer system or network that takes advantage of a specific vulnerability.
Hacker is a person who uses computers and other humans [see Social Engineering] to gain access to data. If the access is unauthorized and malicious, they may be referred to as an Attacker.
Insider Threat is a currently-employed individual at an organization, with valid credentials and company knowledge, that has become dissatisfied or disgruntled and is now a high risk now due to malicious intent towards the organization.
Malware stands for MALicious softWARE that is intentionally created and used to cause interruption of services, retrieval of information, or any form of harmful or maliciously intended operation(s) to a computer(s) and/or a computer network(s). [See Attacks]
Network is a group of shared resources of computers and/or servers, laptops, and/or workstations.
NPI [Non-public Personal Information] is defined as “personal identifiable financial information – provided by a consumer to a financial institution, resulting from any types of transaction(s) or service(s) performed for the consumer; or otherwise obtained by the financial institution.”
OpSec or Operations Security, is the procedure of assessing and securing an operational workspace, person(s), information and/or data for the purposes of anonymity, privacy, and protection from opposing entities.
OSINT refers to Open-Source Intelligence. This is data that is legally collected from free, publicly available sources.
PII [Personally Identifiable Information”] is defined as “information that can identify, relates to, describes, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household”.
Pretext is a pre-established, fabricated story and/or scenario form of Social Engineering with the manipulative intent of focusing an attack on the retrieval of confidential information and/or legal access from a victim.
Recon is short for Reconnaissance, which is the exploration of a subject, object, or person, to gain knowledge and discover vulnerabilities.
Risk Management is the process of identifying, evaluating, and prioritizing vulnerabilities to decide the avoidance, transference, mitigation, or acceptance of the risk.
Scanning is the inspection of the possibility of exploits on a network to identify security vulnerabilities. A vulnerability scan may detect weaknesses in computer system to provide the opportunity to mitigate and rectify the vulnerability before it can be exploited.
Social Engineering is psychological, manipulative art-form of using human interaction and tactics to convince a person(s) to divulge and/or assist in the legitimate authorized retrieval and access of confidential information or data.
Sock Puppet is a fake, deceptive identity created for Recon and/or Social Engineering purposes, to ensure any tracking methods cannot be used to trace back to you and/or your personal accounts.
SOCMINT stands for SOCial Media INTelligence. Refers to a type of OSINT that uses certain techniques and tools use for the collecting of information through the use of Social Engineering on Social Media.
Threat Actor(s) is a person(s) or entity responsible for a malicious event or incident that impacts the safety or security of another entity such as Hackers, APT, Script Kiddies, Organized Crime, or Insider Threats.
Vulnerability is a weakness which can be exploited by an attacker, to perform unauthorized actions within a computer system.
Vulnerability Management is a documented and repeated process of specific procedures of identifying, classifying, prioritizing, remediating and mitigating found vulnerabilities via scans.