Glossary
Cybersecurity 101
Short, plain definitions of the terms you hear in cybersecurity, written by our team.
- Attack surface
- Everything an attacker could reach to get into an organisation: internet-facing servers, domains, cloud services, applications, employee accounts and the suppliers connected to them. It changes every time something is added, moved or forgotten.Learn more
- CAASM
- Cyber asset attack surface management. A single, continuously updated inventory of devices, users, cloud resources and applications, built by combining data from the tools an organisation already uses, so security gaps can be seen and owned.Learn more
- Compromise assessment
- A search for evidence that attackers are already inside: persistence, stolen credentials, unusual accounts and traces of data theft, across endpoints, identities and logs.Learn more
- CVE
- Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. The public identifier given to a specific vulnerability, such as CVE-2026-1182, so everyone refers to the same issue.Learn more
- CVSS
- A 0 to 10 score of how severe a vulnerability is in general. It does not tell you whether the vulnerability is being exploited or whether it matters in your environment.Learn more
- DFIR
- Digital forensics and incident response. Containing an attack, finding out how it happened and what was taken, and restoring operations safely, while preserving evidence that will hold up later.Learn more
- EASM
- External attack surface management. Discovering and monitoring what an organisation exposes to the internet, from the outside, the way an attacker would.Learn more
- ISO 27001
- The international standard for an information security management system. Certification shows that security risks are managed through defined, audited processes.Learn more
- MFA
- Multi-factor authentication. Signing in with something you know and something you have, such as a password and a code or a security key. Phishing-resistant MFA uses keys bound to the real site.
- MITRE ATT&CK
- A public catalogue of the techniques attackers use, from initial access to impact. Teams use it to describe threats and to check which techniques they can detect.
- Penetration test
- An authorised, time-boxed attempt by security specialists to break into a system, application or network, to prove which weaknesses can really be exploited and what an attacker could reach.Learn more
- Phishing
- Messages that impersonate a trusted sender to make someone click, sign in or pay. Lookalike domains and cloned login pages are the usual tools.Learn more
- Ransomware
- Malware that encrypts systems and often steals data first, so attackers can demand payment both to restore access and to stay silent. Most attacks start with stolen credentials or an unpatched internet-facing system.Learn more
- Red teaming
- A longer, objective-based exercise that imitates a real adversary across people, processes and technology, to test whether the organisation detects and responds, not only whether it can be breached.Learn more
- Threat hunting
- Searching proactively for attackers who have not triggered an alert, starting from a hypothesis about how a specific adversary would operate in your environment.Learn more
- Threat intelligence
- Evidence-based knowledge about attackers, their tools and their targets, used to decide what to defend first. Useful intelligence is specific to your organisation and comes with an action.Learn more
- Virtual CISO
- A senior security leader who works part-time for an organisation: setting the security programme, reporting to the board and guiding the team, without a full-time hire.Learn more
- Virtual patching
- Blocking the exploitation of a known vulnerability at the network or application layer, until the software itself can be updated.Learn more
- WAF
- Web application firewall. A layer in front of web applications and APIs that inspects each request and blocks attacks such as injection, cross-site scripting and automated abuse.Learn more
- Zero-day
- A vulnerability attackers exploit before the vendor has released a fix. Defences rely on detecting behaviour rather than a known signature.