Reference

Cybersecurity glossary

Plain-English definitions with context, examples, and related references.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cybersecurity glossary

Plain-English definitions with context, examples, and related references.

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.

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.

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.

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.