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The TechCrunch Cyber Glossary


This glossary includes the most common terms and expressions TechCrunch uses in our security reporting, and explanations of how — and why — we use them.

“White hat” hackers generally hack within legal bounds, like as part of a penetration test sanctioned by the target company, or to collect bug bounties finding flaws in various software and disclosing them to the affected vendor. A distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, is a kind of cyberattack that involves flooding targets on the internet with junk web traffic in order to overload and crash the servers and cause the service, such as a website, online store, or gaming platform to go down. Stalkerware is a kind of surveillance malware (and a form of spyware) that is usually sold to ordinary consumers under the guise of child or employee monitoring software but is often used for the purposes of spying on the phones of unwitting individuals, oftentimes spouses and domestic partners.

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