The FREE Cybersecurity Glossary by Thor Pedersen!

Hijacking attacks: A type of cyberattack in which an attacker takes control of a legitimate user's session or network connection without the user's knowledge or consent. This concept is used in the context of computer security to describe attacks that aim to steal sensitive information or gain unauthorized access to a system. Examples of hijacking attacks include session hijacking, where an attacker takes control of a user's session, and man-in-the-middle attacks, where an attacker intercepts and modifies communications between two parties.

HITRUST (Health Information Trust Alliance): A common security framework used in the healthcare industry to ensure the privacy and security of electronic protected health information (ePHI). It is used by healthcare organizations to assess and mitigate risks to ePHI and to meet regulatory requirements. Examples of organizations using HITRUST include hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies.

Hoax: A deliberate deception or fabrication, often intended to trick or deceive others. It is commonly used in internet scams or fraudulent emails to lure victims into providing sensitive information or money. Examples include receiving an email claiming to be from a Nigerian prince offering a large sum of money in exchange for a small upfront investment or seeing a social media post claiming that a celebrity has died when they are actually alive and well.

Holistic redundancy: Holistic redundancy refers to a comprehensive approach to backup and fault tolerance that encompasses not just data protection but also system and operational resilience. It involves various strategies like data replication, failover systems, and regular testing to ensure all critical components of an IT ecosystem can withstand disruptions.

Homomorphic: A term used in the context of encryption that refers to the ability to perform computations on encrypted data without decrypting it first. Homomorphic encryption allows for the processing of data while maintaining its ciphertext form, ensuring that the data remains secure even in untrusted environments. Once the computation is performed, the results are also in an encrypted form and can be decrypted only with the appropriate key. This property is particularly valuable for privacy-preserving data analysis and cloud computing, where sensitive data can be processed by external servers without exposing the underlying data to those servers. Homomorphic encryption is an active area of research and can be partial, somewhat, or fully homomorphic, depending on the types and complexity of operations it supports.

Honeynet: A network of computers that is intentionally exposed to the Internet to lure attackers and study their methods, used in security research and incident response. Examples include the Honeynet Project and the Honeypot Project.