Term | Definition |
Plagiarism | The act of copying someone else's work and publishing it as your own. This includes text, media, and even ideas. |
Copyright | The legal means of protecting an author's work. It is a type of intellectual property that provides exclusive publication, distribution, and usage rights for the author. |
Piracy | Committed by simply downloading or copying a program that a user has not paid for. |
Public Domain | A range of abstract materials which are not owned or controlled by anyone. These materials are "public property" and available for any purpose to anyone. |
Cybercrime | A criminal activity done using computers and the Internet. |
Hacker | Someone who can gain unauthorized access to other computers. |
Virus | Small programs or scripts that can negatively affect the health of your computer. |
Worm | A type of virus that replicates itself, but does not alter any files on your machine. This virus can multiply so many times that it takes up all available memory space. |
Trojan Horse | Software programs that masquerade as regular programs, such as games, disk utilities, and even antivirus programs. If they run, they can destroy your machine. |
Antivirus | Software is a type of utility used for scanning and removing viruses from your computer. |
Back Door | A means of disabling a system's security which is deliberately left by designers of the system, often to give access to service technicians or maintenance programmers. |
Spoofing | Tricking or deceiving computer systems or other computer users. Typically done by hiding one's identity or faking the identity of another user on the Internet. |
Firewall | Limits the data than can pass through it and protects a networked server or client machine from damage by unauthorized users. |
Encryption | Coding or scrambling of information so that it can only be decoded and read by someone who had the correct decoding key. |
Spyware | Captures information like Web browsing habits, e-mail messages, usernames and passwords, and credit card information. |
Spam | Refers to junk e-mail or irrelevant postings to a newsgroup or bulletin board. |
Identity Theft | Refers to fraud that involves stealing money or getting other benefits by pretending to be someone else. |
Cookies | Data sent to your computer by a Web server that records your actions on a certain Web site. |
Adware | Free software that is supported by advertisements. |
Phishing | The act of stealing your personal information. Emails are sent out that appear legitimate from such sites as E-Bay, PayPal, or banking institutions. |
License Agreement | A legal statement which indicates the terms under which a user may make use of a software product. |
Backup | A copy of one or more files created as an alternate in case the original data is lost or becomes unusable. |
Restore | Means to return something to its former condition. |
Computer Ethics | A set of moral principles that regulate the use of computers. |
Computer Forensics | The application of scientifically proven methods to gather, process, interpret, and use digital evidence to provide a description of cyber crime activities. |