Cyber Vocab 2

brute force password attack

an attempt to guess a password by attempting every possible combination of characters and numbers in it

Cracking

Attempting to reverse-engineer, remove, or bypass a password or other access control protection, such as the copyright protection on software.

Pretexting

a form of social engineering in which one individual lies to obtain confidential data about another individual

Phishing

A form of Internet Fraud that aims to steal valuable information such as credit card details usernames and passwords. Involves sending a link via an email to a website which looks like a genuine website but in fact is bogus. The recipient may be tricked into following the link and entering details such as bank passwords or personal information

advance-fee fraud (AFF)

A form of social engineering, typically conducted via e-mail, in which an organization or some third party indicates that the recipient is due an exorbitant amount of money and needs only a small advance fee or personal banking information to facilitate the transfer.

rainbow table

A table of hash values and their corresponding plaintext values that can be used to look up password values if an attacker is able to steal a system's encrypted password file.

Dictionary password attack

A variation of the brute force password attack that attempts to narrow the range of possible passwords guessed by using a list of common passwords and possibly including attempts based on the target's personal information.