Basic Terminology

This post describes some of the basic terminologies involved in Ethical Hacking:

• Threat - An event or action that might prejudice security. It can also be termed as a potential violation of security.
• Vulnerability - Presence of a weakness in a computer system that can lead to an undesirable event compromising the security of the system.
• Attack - Any action that attempts to violate security of a system.
• Exploit - A piece of software, a data chunk, or command sequence that takes advantage of a bug or vulnerability in order to cause unintended or unanticipated behavior to occur on computer software or hardware.
• IP Address - An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a logical network address of each device (eg. computer, printer) participating in a computer network for the purpose of identification and addressing.
• MAC Address - Media Access Control (MAC) address is a unique serial number assigned to network adapters for identification on the network. 
• DNS - Domain Name System (DNS) is a  hierarchical distributed naming system that translates domain names to IP addresses.
• LAN - Local Area Network (LAN) is a small computer network covering a local area, such as a home or office.
• Client - An application or system that accesses a service made available by a server.
• Server - A server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs (clients).

Other terminologies will be included and described as and when encountered during our exploration.