Gone Phishing
Password Pandemonium
Acronym Alphabet Soup
Breach Hall of Shame
Hackers on Screen (and in Real Life)
100
Phishing delivered by text message gets this “smashing” name.
smishing
100
This six-digit sequence tops the “most common passwords” lists year after year.
123456
100
In security, “MFA” stands for this.
Multi-Factor Authentication
100
The 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack caused panic buying of this at the pump.
Petrol (Gasoline)
100
This 2015 series follows Elliot Alderson, a cybersecurity engineer by day and hacker by night.
Mr. Robot
200
Phishing tailored to one person, using details like their manager’s name or a recent project.
Spear Phishing
200
Attackers replay leaked username and password pairs on other sites. It shares its name with a Thanksgiving side dish.
(Credential) Stuffing
200
You log in once and get access to many apps without re-entering credentials.
SSO (single sign-on)
200
The 2013 Target breach began with stolen credentials from a vendor in this industry, the one that keeps stores cool.
HVAC (heating and air conditioning)
200
In this 1983 film, a teenager nearly starts global thermonuclear war by hacking into NORAD.
WarGames
300
Phishing aimed at senior executives, the “big fish” of the organisation.
Whaling
300
The xkcd comic “correct horse battery staple” popularised this type of long, memorable password.
Passphrase
300
This acronym covers tools that stop sensitive data leaving the company, such as by email or USB.
DLP (data loss prevention)
300
WannaCry (2017) spread using this NSA-linked exploit.
EternalBlue
300
In Jurassic World Rebirth (2025), this insider threat disables the park’s security to steal dinosaur embryos.
Dennis Nedry
400
Scanning a malicious QR code on a poster or parking meter leads to this form of phishing.
Quishing
400
Passkeys, built on the FIDO2 standard, rely on this type of cryptography, with a private key that never leaves your device.
Public-key (asymmetric) cryptography
400
The three goals of the “CIA triad” are confidentiality, integrity and this.
Confidentiality
Integrity
A_______
Availability
400
SolarWinds is the textbook example of this attack, where a trusted vendor’s software update is the delivery vehicle.
Supply chain attack
400
In the 1992 film Sneakers, the shadowy firm “Setec Astronomy” is an anagram of this phrase, a nod to the film’s central plot.
“Too Many Secrets”
500
This attack proxies a real login page and steals your session cookie, defeating basic MFA.
Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM) or Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM)
500
This “seasoning” is random data added to a password before hashing, to defeat rainbow tables.
Salt
500
This 0 to 10 scoring system rates the severity of vulnerabilities.
CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System)
500
Log4Shell (2021) was a critical flaw in this Apache Java logging library.
Log4j
500
This 2010 worm, widely reported to be a US and Israeli operation, sabotaged centrifuges at Natanz in Iran.
Stuxnet