The FREE Cybersecurity Glossary by Thor Pedersen!

Witness: In the context of legal proceedings, a witness is an individual who, either voluntarily or under compulsion, provides testimonial evidence about what they observed or experienced. Witnesses can offer crucial information that may decide the outcome of a trial.

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): A tool used in project management that represents a hierarchical decomposition of a project into manageable components or tasks. In the context of a security project, the WBS might include tasks like threat modeling, security requirements analysis, and system hardening, each of which could be further broken down into more specific tasks. The WBS aids in tracking project progress, managing dependencies, and assigning resources.

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.