Cybersecurity and Cloud Fundamentals

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.

Phishing is an attack that deceives a person into revealing credentials, approving a payment or running malicious content, usually through a message that impersonates someone they trust.

Ransomware is an attack in which criminals gain access to an organisation's systems, encrypt or steal its data, and demand payment to restore access or withhold publication.

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 VLAN divides one physical switched network into several logical segments, each with its own broadcast domain, by tagging frames with a VLAN identifier so that ports and devices in different VLANs cannot reach each other without a router.

Network address translation rewrites the addresses and ports in packets as they cross a network boundary, most commonly so that many devices with private addresses can share one public address to reach the internet.

A domain name is an address in the internet's public namespace that you rent through a registrar for a yearly fee, and it remains yours only while the registrar account holding it stays paid up and under your own control.

Caching keeps the result of expensive work, such as a rendered page or a database query, and serves that stored copy until it expires, making it the largest single source of speed on any busy website.

Uptime is the proportion of time a service answers requests, quoted in nines, and a service level agreement is the contract clause setting out how that proportion is counted and what the provider owes when it falls short.