From the course: Cybersecurity Awareness: Cybersecurity Terminology

Secure practices, terms, and exercises

From the course: Cybersecurity Awareness: Cybersecurity Terminology

Secure practices, terms, and exercises

- [Instructor] Technology is often the most talked about and most considered side of security. Let's walk through a few definitions of terms often used when describing how to secure environments. First up is encryption. Think of encryption as a secret code that one needs to decipher in order to understand the true meaning or gain access, and more specific to security, it is data, such as passwords, messages, and even payment information. A good visual for this is to think of encryption like a decoder ring toy. You have a message that you want to get to your friend, that you don't want anyone without the decoder ring to understand. So it becomes a secret message. This is the same with encryption. In that once encrypted, only the right people with the right technologies can decrypt the content. Most companies will require encryption of secret or confidential files, especially if being shared outside of the company. However, not everything is encrypted by default. If something is not encrypted, it is known in the industry as cleartext. Often you'll hear cleartext when someone is referring to finding or storing of passwords. To refer to the previous decoder ring example, this would be like sharing a secret message but forgetting to put it in secret code. So anyone that finds your message would be able to read it and use the information. Computer or digital forensics is when a person or team is tasked with uncovering information on a system or network, usually for the purpose of a court case or investigation. Computer forensics can be thought of almost as detectives looking into evidence in a case. Just as detectives in a real case would look through physical evidence, computer forensics is tasked with looking through digital evidence. These teams often deploy a lot of tools to recover data or pull it as needed. Some of these tools may even include description techniques if data needed has been encrypted. Next step is penetration testing. A good way to think of this is similar to how car manufacturers intentionally crash their cars with dummies inside in order to find any issues or flaws so they can build their cars to be more safe. In cybersecurity, penetration tests are done by a network to find flaws or vulnerabilities in a controlled environment before cyber criminals find them and exploit them. Findings from such tests allow networks and environments to be hardened in order to create more security.

Contents