Introduction to Cyber Security

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.

A security operations centre is the team, tooling and process that monitors an organisation's systems for security events around the clock, triages alerts, and starts the response to those that are real.

A security risk assessment identifies the threats to an organisation's assets, estimates how likely each is and how much harm it would do, and ranks them so that limited effort goes where it reduces the most harm.

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.

DHCP is the protocol by which a device joining a network asks for and receives an address, a subnet mask, a default gateway and DNS servers from a server, for a limited lease period, so that nobody has to configure addresses by hand.

A wireless LAN connects devices to a network over radio using the 802.11 family of standards, through access points that bridge the wireless medium onto the wired network and enforce the authentication and encryption that the shared airwaves demand.

A CDN is a worldwide network of servers that answers requests for your site from a location near the person asking, instead of sending every request back to the single machine your site runs on.

DNS is the distributed lookup system that turns a hostname such as getting-digital.net into the IP address a browser can connect to, by walking a chain of nameservers whose answers are then cached for a lifetime the domain's owner publishes.

SSL/TLS is the protocol that encrypts the connection between a browser and a server and, by way of a certificate signed by a certificate authority, proves the server is entitled to answer for the domain in the address bar.