Glossary
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.
