Cyber Security for Managers: Tools for Cyber Action Plan

A penetration test is an authorised, scoped attempt by a skilled tester to exploit weaknesses in a system the way an attacker would, ending in a report the owner can act on.

Incident response is the prepared, practised process by which an organisation detects a security incident, contains it, removes the cause, recovers, and learns from what happened.

Threat modelling is the structured practice of asking what could go wrong with a system, who would make it go wrong and how, while the design can still be changed cheaply.

Subnetting divides an address block into smaller networks by choosing how many leading bits identify the network, written as a prefix length or a subnet mask, so that each subnet has its own range of host addresses and its own routing entry.

Routing is how packets move between networks: each router holds a table of known destinations and the next hop toward each, learned by configuration or by a protocol, and forwards each packet to the most specific match.

Switching is the forwarding of frames within a single network segment by a device that learns which hardware address sits on which port and sends each frame only where it needs to go.

A web server is the program listening on a network port for HTTP requests and answering them, either by returning a file from disk or by handing the request to application code behind it.

IaaS is the layer of cloud computing where you rent raw infrastructure through an API, meaning virtual machines, disks and networks, and take responsibility for the operating system and everything you install above it.

PaaS is a hosting layer that takes your source code and turns it into a running application for you, owning the machines, the runtime, the build, the routing, the certificates and the restarts, so that shipping becomes a push rather than a project.