The FREE Cybersecurity Glossary by Thor Pedersen!

Work factor: A measure of the effort required to perform a certain task or to break a certain system. It is used in cryptography to determine the security of a cryptographic system. Examples of work factors include the time required to brute-force a password or the amount of memory required to perform a certain cryptographic operation.

World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO): An international organization that promotes and facilitates the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights globally through services such as the registration and protection of trademarks, patents, and copyrights under international treaties and systems.

World Wide Web (WWW): An information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), which may be interlinked by hypertext and accessible over the internet. The web has drastically changed how we access and share information globally.

WPA2: A security protocol for wireless networks that uses encryption to protect data transmitted over the network. It is commonly used in home and office Wi-Fi networks, as well as in public Wi-Fi hotspots. Examples of its use include securing data transmitted by a laptop to a wireless printer or protecting credit card information entered on a smartphone when connected to a public Wi-Fi network.

WPA3: Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) is the third and latest generation of the WPA security protocol for wireless networks. It was introduced to provide more robust authentication and increased cryptographic strength for highly sensitive data markets. WPA3 offers improved security features over its predecessor, WPA2, such as greater protection against offline dictionary attacks and forward secrecy, which ensures that captured traffic can't be decrypted even if the password is compromised later.

Write: The act of creating or recording information on a storage medium such as a hard drive or flash drive. It is commonly used in computing to save and update data. Examples include saving a document, updating a database, and writing to a log file.