Glossary of Security Terminology

A

ACL - Access Control List
AD - Active Directory
AES - Advanced Encryption Standard
AFP - Apple Filing Protocol
ARIN - American Registry of Internet Numbers
ASCII - American Standard Code for Information Interchange

B

BGP - Border Gateway Protocol
Black Box Testing - An engagement conducted with very little provided information; typically only the name of the target.
Blue Team - Defensive security personnel. SOC workers, analysts, ...

C

CD - Compact Disk
CDN - Content Delivery Network
CIFS - Common Internet File System
CLI - Command Line Interface
Clear Box Testing - See White Box Testing.
Crystal Box Testing - See White Box Testing.

D

DBIR - Data Breach Investigation Report
DMA - Direct Memory Access
DNS - Domain Name System
Double Blind Testing - An engagement in which the attack is kept secret from most employees. TYpically used for assessing an organization's security posture including monitoring systems, IDS/IPS functionality, and incident response procedures.

E

EL - Engagement Letter

F

FC - Fiber Channel
FDE - Full Disk Encryption
FTP - File Transfer Protocol

G

GHDB - Google Hacking Database
GPU - Graphics Processing Unit
Grey Box Testing - An engagement conducted with basic information initially provided by the client. Examples of information: operating system, hardware vendors/models, IP address ranges, ...
GUI - Graphical User Interface

H

HAL - Hardware Abstraction Layer
HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol

I

IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
ICS - Industrial Control System
IDE (hardware) - Integrated Device Electronics
IDE (software) - Interactive Development Environment
IDS - Intrusion Detection System (Snort, Suricata, ...)
IP - Internet Protocol
IPS - Intrusion Prevention|Protection System (Suricata, OSSEC, ...)
IRQ - Interrupt Request
ISMI - International Mobile Subscriber Identity

J

JSON - JavaScript Object Notation

K

L

LAN - Local Area Network
LLMNR - Local Link Multicast Name Request

M

MBR - Master Boot Record (first sector of a disk)

N

NAS - Network Attached Storage
NB-NS - NetBIOS Name Service
NetBIOS - Network Basic Input Output System
NFS - Network File System
NIST - National Institute of Standards and Technology
NOP - No Operation
NTLM - New Technology LAN Manager

O

OO - Object-Oriented
OOP - Object-Oriented Programming
OS - Operating System
OSINT - Open Source Intelligence
OSSTMM - Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual
OWASP - Open Web Application Security Project

P

PCI - Peripheral Component Interconnect
PCI (compliance) - Payment Card Industry (MasterCard data security standard)
PGP - Pretty Good Privacy
PoC - Proof of Concept
POST - Power-On Self Test
PRNG - Pseudorandom Number Generator
PSTN - Public Switched Telephone Network
PtH - Pass the Hash
PXE - Preboot Execution Environment

Q

QoS - Quality of Service

R

Red Team - Offensive security personnel. Penetration testers.
RFP - Request for Proposal
ROP - Return-Oriented Programming

S

SAN - Storage Area Network
SCADA - Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition
SDLC - System Development Life Cycle
SID - Security Identifier
SIEM - Security Information and Event Management.
SIGINT - Signals Intelligence
SMB - Server Message Block
SOC - Security Operations Center
SOW - Statement of Work. Typically applies to the scope of a penetration test engagement.
SSH - Secure Shell
SSL - Secure Sockets Layer

T

TCP - Transmission Control Protocol
TLS - Transport Layer Security

U

UDP - User Datagram Protocol
UEFI - Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
USB - Universal Serial Bus

V

VA - Vulnerability Assessment
VM - Virtual Machine
VMS - Vulnerability Management Solution (Nessus, OpenVAS, Qualys, ...)
VOIP - Voice Over Internet Protocol

W

White Box Testing - An engagement conducted from the point of view of an insider or well-informed attacker.
WPAD - Web Proxy Auto Discovery

X

XSS - Cross-site Scripting

Y

YAML - Yet Another Markup Language

Z