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The A to Z of security
Got the Love Bug? Scared of spyware? Read all about what's keeping techies awake at night...

By Natasha Lomas

Published: Tuesday 14 November 2006

Neologisms

An inordinate number of new words and terms are continually being forged to keep pace with the dubious activities of spammers, scammers and malware writers.

Some common security-inspired neologisms you still won't find in the average dusty dictionary are: adware, spyware and malware. But there are many, many more - and many more obscure ones too.

Security from A to Z

Click on the links below to find out more...

A is for Antivirus
B is for Botnets
C is for CMA
D is for DDoS
E is for Extradition
F is for Federated identity
G is for Google
H is for Hackers
I is for IM
J is for Jaschan (Sven)
K is for Kids
L is for Love Bug
M is for Microsoft
N is for Neologisms
O is for Orange
P is for Passwords
Q is for Questions
R is for Rootkits
S is for Spyware
T is for Two-factor authentication
U is for USB sticks/devices
V is for Virus variants
W is for Wi-fi
X is for OS X
Y is for You
Z is for Zero-day

Another common industry-inspired term, 'spam' - which derives its name from the Monty Python spam sketch - has in recent years spawned a couple of lesser known siblings: spit and spim - or 'spam over internet telephony' and 'spam over IM'.

And then there are the 'ph' words - phishing, phreaking, pharming - which strap themselves into the hacker convention of using 'alternative' phonetic spellings.

Some more portmanteaus - hacktivism and hackmail - describe politically motivated hacking, and the act of blackmailing a website for money by using a threat to take it offline, as experienced by many an online gambling site.

A few more colourful neologisms include bruteforce, honeypot, logicbomb, scriptkiddie, sniffer and zombie.

And there's a whole host more...

Let us know your favourite security-inspired neologisms by posting a Reader Comment below or emailing us at editorial@silicon.com.