Cabinet Office
Assured products – IT products which have been approved by Government as having a recognised level of security efficiency.
BS 7799, ISO/IEC 17799 – a set of best practice rules and methods for information security management defined by the British Standards Institution and the International Standards Organisation.
Critical national infrastructure (CNI) – the most important elements of the nation's infrastructure involving vital systems and services, such as communications and utilities.
Denial of Service (DoS) attack – where a target system becomes overloaded by messages sent to it and it collapses.
Firewall – a piece of hardware or software designed to limit access between your computer and the Internet.
Information assurance – the confidence that information systems will protect the information they handle and will function as they need to, when they need to, under the control of legitimate users.
Information systems – information technology or telecommunications systems, services and networks.
Malware – general term used to describe any sort of malicious software such as viruses, worms, trojans, etc.
Phishing – involves criminals using the Internet to deceive people into disclosing their credit card numbers, bank account details or other valuable information.
Trojan – a program designed to allow it unauthorised access to the computer systems it infects. Trojans may also be used in order to exploit a computer system to send unsolicited e–mails.
Virus – a computer program designed to run on one computer (often with undesirable effects such as deleting files or sending unsolicited e–mails) and send copies to as many other computers as possible.
Worm – an independent computer program that replicates from machine to machine across network connections, often clogging information systems as it spreads.