One of the most dangerous types of Trojan. Backdoors provide the author or operator of the Trojan with remote administration of a victim’s machine. Unlike legitimate remote administration utilities, they install, launch and run invisibly, without the consent or knowledge… Read Full Article

The porting of a code snippet, module, or other part of a program to an older version of the software. In the field of information security, backporting refers to an attempt to install a patch for a vulnerability in the… Read Full Article

A copy of data on backup media. It aids the recovery of information if damaged or lost. Information security experts recommend making regular backup copies of all important data, and storing them on an external drive or in the cloud.… Read Full Article

Banking Trojans steal account data for online banking systems, e-payment systems and plastic card systems from customers of these services and send the data to the author or operator of the Trojan.

Also known as Shellshock. A family of security bugs in the widely used Unix Bash shell, the first of which was disclosed on 24 September 2014. Many Internet-facing services, such as some web server deployments, use Bash to process certain… Read Full Article

A text file containing a sequence of commands able to be executed by the operating system. The BAT file standard used in Windows supports a minimum set of operators for creating scripts to automate routine operations and run applications. Cybercriminals… Read Full Article

A BEC attack is one in which the attacker uses social engineering to gain access to a corporate email account. Once inside, the cybercriminal can send phishing messages, spam, or malicious programs to recipients on behalf of the compromised company.… Read Full Article

This refers to the technique of deciding whether an application is malicious or not, according to what it does. If an application does something that falls outside the range of ‘acceptable’ actions, its operation is restricted.

An advanced stage of the software release life cycle. Beta testing is carried out when the application is feature complete and close to the finished version. The purpose of testing is to identify the maximum number of bugs and errors… Read Full Article

An application protocol that routes packets between autonomous segments of the Internet. It is used to transfer information about network nodes available to a group of connected hosts. This information determines the shortest path taken by each packet. BGP is… Read Full Article

A set of tools and methods for processing large amounts of unstructured data. The same term is used to denote a data array for which processing with a traditional DBMS is impossible or inefficient. The emergence of Big Data stems… Read Full Article

This term is applied to the compiled instructions contained within an executable file. Binary code is not human-readable and can only be understood by the computer’s processor when the program is run. Source code, by contrast, is made up of… Read Full Article

System firmware providing runtime services for interaction between application software and computer hardware. Most BIOS implementations take the form of a dedicated chip-based API. Historically, the term applies to devices with an x86 processor architecture, since the creators of other… Read Full Article

A method of cracking cryptographic algorithms through matches in hash functions. It is based on the birthday paradox, according to which the probability of two people sharing a birthday is far higher than it seems — for a group of… Read Full Article

Bitcoin is a digital cryptocurrency that emerged in 2008 as the brain-child of ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ and was released as open-source software in 2009. Trading occurs on a peer-to-peer basis and is not regulated by a central authority. Instead of having… Read Full Article

A term used in hacker culture to describe a typical cybercriminal who uses their knowledge and skills to carry out criminal activities: hacking programs/websites, stealing data, encrypting information to extract a ransom. Unlike ethical hackers (white hats), who help improve… Read Full Article

Improving a site’s position in search results using methods that are banned or not approved by search engines. Black SEO deceives search robots in various ways, enabling content that is not relevant to a user request to top the search… Read Full Article

The redirection of traffic to a non-existent resource (a so-called black hole), or the blocking of it. Blackholing is used by Internet providers to block certain IP addresses and domains used to send spam or carry out DDoS attacks.

A type of session hijacking in which the cybercriminal does not see the target host’s response to the transmitted requests. The attacker, being in a man-in-the-middle position, can only introduce malicious injections into the victim’s data packets, blindly guessing their… Read Full Article

A technology which represents a continuous list of transaction records called blocks that are chain-connected. Each block contains information from the previous one plus new information. The main principle of blockchain is that the block information is confirmed by several… Read Full Article

A name of the message about a Windows system error which occurs after detecting a default code or system file damage, so that the system stops running. When an error occurs, there is a white text on a blue background… Read Full Article

The sending of unsolicited, anonymous messages to a mobile phone via Bluetooth. The file format is VCF, which is used for exchanging contacts. The message text is placed in the vCard header, and appears on the screen of the target… Read Full Article

Unauthorized access to mobile device data through a Bluetooth connection. Bluesnarfing attacks appeared in the early stages of developing data transfer technology and involved connecting to a third-party phone or tablet without the device owner’s permission. It enabled an attacker… Read Full Article

A wireless data transfer protocol for interaction between devices. The standard describes a personal area network based on radio waves for the exchange of information at a range of no more than 10 meters. Bluetooth is widely used for communications… Read Full Article

A disk containing the system files required to load an operating system. These files may be located on a hard disk or removable media (floppy disk, CD or USB memory storage device).

The boot sector is the area on a hard disk and floppy disks containing instructions that are executed during the boot process, i.e. when the PC starts. Among other things, the boot sector specifies the location of the operating system… Read Full Article

A bootkit is a malicious program designed to load as early as possible in the boot process, in order to control all stages of the operating system start up, modifying system code and drivers before anti-virus and other security components… Read Full Article

A bot is a program that acts as an agent for some other program or person and is used to carry out routine tasks. Their use for malicious purposes includes spam distribution, credentials harvest and the launching of DDoS attacks.

A botnet (zombie network, zombie army) is a network of malware-infected devices remotely controlled by cybercriminals. Read Full Article

A Browser Helper Object (BHO) is a DLL that loads every time Microsoft Internet Explorer runs. Typically, a BHO is installed by a third party program to enhance the functionality of the web browser (many Internet Explorer plugins, for example,… Read Full Article

Browser Hijackers modify the user’s web browser settings. This may involve changing the default home page, re-directing searches to unwanted web sites, adding unwanted (sometimes pornographic) bookmarks or generating unwanted pop-up windows.

Method that allows cybercriminals to change browser settings, re-direct incorrect or incomplete URLs, or change the default homepage. It may also redirect searches to ‘pay-to-view’ (often pornographic) web sites

This is a method for guessing a password (or the key used to encrypt a message) that involves systematically trying all possible combinations of characters until the correct one is found. This could take a very long time, so one… Read Full Article

An error in a computer program that occurs when an attempt is made to place a block of data in memory that exceeds the amount of space allocated for it. Buffer overflow can be exploited to carry out a denial… Read Full Article

A program to encourage the search for bugs and vulnerabilities in software. Bug bounties are normally announced by the developers of applications and network platforms to identify security issues. Under such programs, bug hunters typically receive a monetary reward for… Read Full Article

A type of website hosting with no or few restrictions on content. Bulletproof services are actively used by platforms such as online casinos, spam distribution sites, and pornographic resources. Such hosting tends to be several times pricier than usual.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) refers to the corporate policy of allowing employees to bring personal devices into the organisation and use them to access corporate resources. Typically, BYOD is used to refer to smartphones, but it can also apply… Read Full Article