Cybersecurity Basics
This practice of sending fraudulent messages to trick people into revealing private information or passwords
Network device that forwards packets between different networks.
What is a router?
A sequence of instructions a computer executes to perform a task.
What is a program?
Encryption type that uses the same key to encrypt and decrypt data.
What is symmetric encryption?
Core part of the OS that manages hardware, processes, and system calls.
What is the kernel?
Software created to damage, exploit, or otherwise harm a computer system.
What is malware?
The protocol used to transfer and render standard web pages.
What is HTTP?
Loop structure that continues while a condition remains true.
What is a while loop?
A widely used public-key algorithm often used to secure web traffic.
What is RSA?
Fast temporary storage of data to speed up repeated access.
What is caching?
An access control model that assigns permissions based on a user’s job function.
What is role-based access control (RBAC)?
The numerical label assigned to each device on an IPv4 network.
What is an IP address?
Data structure that stores key–value pairs for fast lookup.
What is a dictionary (or map)?
A function that maps input to a fixed-length string and is designed to be irreversible.
What is a cryptographic hash (a one-way function)?
OS feature that lets multiple programs run so users think they run at the same time.
What is multitasking?
The process of scrambling data so only authorized parties can read it.
What is encryption?
Technique that translates private IP addresses to a public one for internet access.
What is Network Address Translation (NAT)?
The activity of locating, diagnosing, and fixing code errors.
What is debugging?
Successor to SSL that secures HTTP connections and other traffic.
What is TLS (Transport Layer Security)?
Safeguard that prevents one process from reading or writing another’s memory.
What is memory protection?
An attack that overwhelms a service or network with traffic to make it unavailable.
What is a Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack?
Secure file-transfer protocol that runs over an encrypted SSH connection.
What is SFTP?
OOP principle that bundles data and methods, hiding internal state.
What is encapsulation?
Authentication method where a server sends a challenge and the client proves knowledge without sending the password directly.
What is challenge–response authentication?
OS technique that uses disk space to make programs think they have more RAM than physically available.
What is virtual memory (paging)?