glossary

A backdoor Trojan is a way to take control of a system without permission. Usually, a backdoor Trojan poses as a legitimate program spreading through phishing campaigns and fooling users into clicking a malicious link or accessing malware on a website. Once the system is infected, the Trojan can access sensitive files, send and receive data online and track the browsing history. To avoid this type of infection, you should keep the system up-to-date with the latest patches and have strong anti-malware protection.

A backup is an exact copy of your files, your system files or any other system resources you need to protect. This precaution is necessary for all types of unpredictable events, like a system crash or when you remove or lose those files. The backup is supposed to be independent from your system and be used only when necessary. There are also cases when the system or those files become infected, and you need to recover them. Or when the system is blocked by a ransomware.

Skilled computer users with malicious intents, they seek to compromise the security of a person or organization for personal gain. Blackhat hackers frequently specialize, for example in malware development, spam delivery, exploit discovery, DDoS attacks and more. Not all blackhat hackers use the malware they developed or the exploits they discover. Some just find them and sell the know-how to the highest bidder. Their favorite targets are financial information (such as credit card data or bank accounts), personal information (like email accounts and passwords), as well as sensitive company data (such as employee/client databases).

To blacklist in IT security means to organize a list of senders that have developed malicious activities, like phishing or spam. At the same time, a blacklist can contain several applications or programs that should not be launched on a system. For a firewall solution, blacklisting refers to a number of IP addresses that have been blocked and to which the system cannot connect for safety reasons.

Internet bots or web bots are software programs that perform automated tasks and specific operations. Though some bots serve harmless purposes in video games or online locations, there are a number of bots that can be employed in large networks, from where they can deliver malicious ads on popular sites or launch distributed online attacks against a number of designated targets.

A botnet is a network of infected computers that communicate with each other in order to perform the same malicious actions, like launching spam campaigns or distributed denial-of-service attacks. The network can be controlled remotely by online criminals to serve their interests and, at the same time, this allows the hackers to avoid detection or legal actions by law agencies.

Browser hijacking is the process of changing the default homepage or search engine in your web browser by a malicious program without your permission. The user can notice that the affected changes can not be reversed and a security tool needs to be used against this type of software. It is not considered a serious threat to the overall system security, but it needs to be addressed fast since web browsing is affected.

A buffer overflow takes place when a program or an application tries to store excess data in a temporary storage area (a buffer) and that extra information overflows into other parts of a computer’s memory. This is something hackers took advantage from and these types of attacks can lead to unauthorized code running or system crashes.

A bug is a software flaw that produces an unexpected result that may affect the system’s performance. Usually, a bug may cause system crashing or freezing. The main security issue that could appear is that bugs allow hackers to bypass access privileges or retrieve sensitive data from a network.

Bulk encryption is a set of security protocols that provide the necessary means to encrypt and decrypt data transmissions in order to offer protection from security breaches and online theft.