Reference
Cybersecurity glossary
One sentence you can quote, then the detail if you need it. Every term links to the pages where it actually matters.
Every entry here starts with one quotable sentence, then explains why the concept matters, how it works in practice, concrete examples, and how it is detected or measured. A definition without that context cannot be acted on, so a one-line entry is not published as its own page.
Terms are grouped by the area they belong to and cross-linked to the guides and threat profiles where they appear, so the glossary works as an entry point into a cluster rather than as a dead end.
What this section covers
- Website security and search-visible compromise terminology.
- Web hardening controls, primarily HTTP-level browser protections.
- Security operations: the tooling and functions a SOC runs on.
- Fundamentals that underpin the rest, such as least privilege and zero trust.
Website security
- SEO spam
- SEO spam is unauthorised content or links injected into a website so that attackers can rank and monetise pages on someone else's domain.
- Cloaking
- Cloaking is serving different content to search engine crawlers than to human visitors for the same URL.
- Doorway page
- A doorway page is a low-value page created mainly to rank for a query and funnel visitors somewhere else, rather than to serve them itself.
- Backdoor
- A backdoor is code or configuration left on a system that lets an attacker regain access after the original entry point is closed.
- Redirect chain
- A redirect chain is a sequence of two or more redirects between the URL a visitor requested and the page finally served.
Web hardening
- Security headers
- Security headers are HTTP response headers that instruct the browser to enforce protections such as transport security, framing rules and allowed script sources.
- Content Security Policy (CSP)
- A Content Security Policy is an HTTP header that declares which sources a page may load scripts, styles and other resources from.
- HSTS
- HTTP Strict Transport Security is a response header that tells browsers to contact a site only over HTTPS for a stated period.
Security operations
- SOC (Security Operations Centre)
- A SOC is the team, process and tooling responsible for monitoring, triaging and responding to security events for an organisation.
- SIEM
- A SIEM is a platform that centralises log and event data so detections can run across sources and analysts can investigate in one place.
- EDR
- Endpoint Detection and Response is agent-based tooling that records endpoint activity, detects malicious behaviour and allows remote containment.
- Vulnerability management
- Vulnerability management is the ongoing process of discovering, prioritising, remediating and verifying weaknesses across an estate.
- CVE
- A CVE is a public identifier assigned to a specific disclosed software vulnerability so everyone can refer to the same issue unambiguously.
Security fundamentals
- Least privilege
- Least privilege is the practice of granting each account, service or process only the permissions it needs for its task, and nothing more.
- Zero trust
- Zero trust is an architecture that authenticates and authorises every request on its own merits instead of trusting anything because of its network location.