W32.Kriz Virus
The Kriz virus (known more formally as W32.Kriz, W32.Kriz.dr, or PE_KRIZ) infects files on Windows 9x and Windows NT and 2000 systems. It has a potentially devastating payload that triggers on December 25th of any year once an infected file is run. When this happens, the virus overwrites files on the floppy disk drive, hard drive, RAM drive, and network drives.

WAFS: Wide-Area File Service
Wide-area file services (WAFS) is a storage technology that makes it possible to access a remote data center as though it were local. Among other benefits, WAFS enables businesses, academic institutions, and government agencies having numerous branch offices to centrally manage data backups in real time.

Wannabee
Wannabee is a generally pejorative term for somebody who would like to be thought of as more proficient than he or she actually is. The implication is that wannabees are not actually capable of being what they want to be. It is often used to describe 'wannabee hackers'. Script kiddies can be described as wannabee hackers or crackers.

WAP: Wireless Application Protocol
The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) refers to a group of related technologies and protocols widely used as a de facto standard protocol in providing Internet access to mobile phones or other thin-client devices. Typical use of the WAP protocol involves a website transmitting scaled-down versions of normal web pages specifically optimized for use by wireless telecommunications devices. When used with Wireless Markup Language (WML), for example, hyperlinks can be accessed by the numbers of 0 through 9 in addition to assigned hotkeys on a user's phone.

War Dialing
War Dialing is the process of dialing all the numbers in a range in order to find any machine that answers.

War Chalking
War chalking refers to marking buildings or sidewalks with chalk to show others where it's possible to access an exposed company wireless network. These access points are typically found through war driving.

War Dialer
War Dialer is a computer program that automatically dials a series of telephone numbers to find lines connected to computer systems, and catalogs those numbers so that a cracker can try to break into the systems.

War Driving (Wardriving)
War driving (wardriving) is the process of traveling around looking for wireless access point signals that can be used to get network access. Some computer hackers are content to simply map any open, unsecured WLANs they find. Others have adopted the practice of warchalking, tagging nearby pavement to allow others to tap in and steal bandwidth from those hotspots.

Warspamming
Warspamming describes a potential method of generating vast amounts of anonymous spam. It particularly applies to the use of a third party's mail server hacked via an insecure wireless network. If the hacker can gain access the mail server, it could be used to relay spam with no chance of the true originator ever being traced (unless caught in the act).

Wassenaar Arrangement
Wassenaar Arrangement is an international agreement on export controls for conventional arms and dual-use goods and technologies.

Watchdog Spoofing
Watchdog spoofing is a term used in a NetWare based network when imitating a return "session keep alive" packet happens. NetWare servers send "session keep alive" packets, also known as watchdog packets, to clients who must return the packet to keep a session active.

Watermark
Watermark is a technique used in the steganography, which hides a secret message within an ordinary message and the extraction of it at its destination. Steganography takes cryptography a step farther by hiding an encrypted message so that no one suspects it exists. Ideally, anyone scanning your data will fail to know it contains encrypted data.

WDMZ: Wireless Deminitarized Zone
Wireless Deminitarized Zone (WDMZ) is an area that separates the WLAN from the corporate network by a router or a firewall.

Weak Encryption
Weak Encryption refers to using a key of insufficient length to prevent the possibility or even probability that it could be cracked within a meaningful time frame. Also used to describe cryptosystems that have a flawed design, and consequently are broken easily.

Weak Password
A typical weak password is short and consists solely of letters in a single case. It is easy to be guessed and broken.

Weak key
Weak key refers to a cryptographic key that can be cracked easily because of its unique mathematical properties.

Web Bugs
Web bug refers to the process used to secretly pass information from the user's computer to a third party website. If used in conjunction with cookies, web bugs can be used to gather and track data in the stateless environment of the world wide web

Web of Trust
A web of trust is the trust that naturally evolves as a user starts to trust other's signatures, and the signatures that they trust.

Web Server
Web Server is a software process that runs on a host computer connected to the Internet to respond to HTTP requests for documents from client web browsers.

Web anonymizer
Web anonymizer refers to any tool for anonymous Web browsing, any method for browsing the World Wide Web anonymously.

Web permissions
Web permissions refers to the special permissions for configuring access to Web content in Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS).

Wellenreiter
Wellenreiter is a wireless network discovery and auditing tool, based on Linux OS. It can discover networks (BSS/IBSS), and detects ESSID broadcasting or non-broadcasting networks and their WEP capabilities and the manufacturer automatically. DHCP and ARP traffic is decoded and displayed to give you further information about the networks. An ethereal/tcpdump-compatible dumpfile and an Application savefile will be automaticly created. Using a supported GPS device and the gpsd, you can track the location of the discovered networks.

WEP: Wired Equivalent Privacy
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is a security protocol, specified in the IEEE Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) standard, 802.11b, that is designed to provide a wireless local area network (WLAN) with a level of security and privacy comparable to what is usually expected of a wired LAN. WEP is based on a security scheme called RC4 that utilizes a combination of secret user keys and system-generated values. The original implementations of WEP supported so-called 40-bit encryption, having a key length of 40 bits and 24 additional bits of system-generated data (64 bits total). Research has shown that 40-bit WEP encryption is too easy to be decoded, and consequently product vendors today employ 128-bit encryption (having a key length of 104 bits, not 128 bits) or better.

WEPCrack
WEPCrack is an open source tool for breaking 802.11 WEP secret keys. This tool is an implementation of the attack described by Fluhrer, Mantin, and Shamir. WEPCrack was the first publically available code that demonstrated the above attack.

WFP: Windows File Protection
Windows File Protection (WFP) is a mechanism for preventing critical system files from being modified on Microsoft Windows platforms.

Whisker
Whisker is a tool for scanning a network for hosts running Common Gateway Interface (CGI) applications.

White Hat
White hat describes an ethical hacker who identifies a security weakness in a computer system or network but, instead of taking malicious advantage of it, exposes the weakness in a way that will allow the system's owners to fix the breach before it can be taken advantage of by others (such as black hat hackers.)

WHOIS
WHOIS is a system for finding information about IP and domain information on networks.

Wiegand
Wiegand is the trade name for a technology used in card readers and sensors, particularly for access control applications. Wiegand devices were originally developed by HID Corporation.

Windows LSASS Buffer Overrun
Windows LSASS vulnerability, which is a buffer overrun that allows remote code execution and enables an attacker to gain full control of the affected system.

Windows NT Challenge/Response
Windows NT Challenge/Response, also known as NTLM, is the authentication protocol used by Microsoft Windows NT.

Windows Update
Windows Update is an online extension of the Microsoft Windows platform for keeping user's PC system secure and up-to-date.

Windump
Windump is a freeware tool for Windows that is a protocol analyzer that can monitor network traffic on a wire.

Wingate
Wingate is a product that allows people on a small home network or a larger business network to share and control access to the Internet through a single computer connection. The Wingate program can be installed in a computer hooked up to the Internet with a dial-up, Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), cable modem, or dedicated T-carrier system connection. The computer with Wingate acts as a proxy server and firewall for the computer users inside the home or business.

Winnowing
Winnowing is to separate out or eliminate the poor or useless parts from the packet. Chaffing and winnowing are dual components of a privacy-enhancement scheme that does not require encryption. The technique consists of adding false packets to a message at the source, and then removing the false packets at the destination.

WinNuke
WinNuke, also knowns as "blue bomb", is a technique for causing the Windows operating system of someone you're communicating with to crash or suddenly terminate. The "blue bomb" is actually an out-of-band network packet containing information that the operating system can't process. This condition causes the operating system to "crash" or terminate prematurely.

WinTrinoo
WinTrinoo is a Windows based tool for launching a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Winux
Winux is a virus that infects both Microsoft Windows and Linux-based systems.

Wiretapping
Wiretapping, also known as telephone tapping, means monitoring and recording telephone and Internet conversations that is flowing between two points in a communication system. Wiretapping by government agencies with a court order is regulated by law (CALEA) in the US.

WLAN Access Point Attack
WLAN access points are generally connected to wired Layer 2 access switches, which ultimately connect to RADIUS and Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) servers. The wireless clients and access points use Cisco LEAP to authenticate the WLAN client devices and end users against the RADIUS servers. Because Cisco LEAP does not yet support one-time passwords, passwords could be susceptible to brute-force hacking. To guard against this, IT departments should require that users choose strong passwords and set account lockouts after a small number of incorrect login attempt

Wolf
The paper, "Sheep, Goats, Lambs and Wolves - An Analysis of Individual Differences in Speaker Recognition Performance" used a menagerie analogy to explain the differences in speech recognition.

World-writable
World-writable is a term in UNIX system, which refers to permissions on a file that allow any user to modify the file.

Worm
Worms are malicious software applications designed to spread via computer networks. Worms are one form of malware along with viruses and trojans. A person typically installs worms by inadvertently opening an email attachment or message that contains executable scripts. Once installed on a computer, worms spontaneously generate additional email messages contaning copies of the worm. They may also open TCP ports to create networks security holes for other applications, and they may attempt to "flood" the LAN with spurious Denial of Service (DoS) data transmissions. Worm can easily penetrate most firewalls and other network security measures, and propagate a complete working version of itself onto other hosts on a network, and may consume computer resources destructively.

WPA: Wi-Fi Protected Access
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is a data encryption specification for 802.11 wireless networks that replaces the weaker WEP. Created by the WiFi Alliance before a 802.11i security standard was ratified by the IEEE, it improves on WEP by using dynamic keys, Extensible Authentication Protocol to secure network access, and an encryption method called Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) to secure data transmissions. WPA provides roughly comparable security to VPN tunneling with WEP, with the benefit of easier administration and use.

WPA: Windows Product Activation
Windows Product Activation (WPA) is a Microsoft technology aimed at reducing software piracy.

WPA2: Wi-Fi Protected Access 2
Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) is an enhanced version of WPA. It is the official 802.11i standard that was ratified by the IEEE in June, 2004. It uses the Advanced Encryption Standard instead of TKIP (see above). AES supports 128-bit, 192-bit and 256-bit keys.

Wrap
Wrap, in information security, refers to using cryptography to provide data confidentiality service for a data object.

WRM: Windows Rights Management
Windows Rights Management (WRM) is a technology from Microsoft Corporation for secure content management.

WS-Security: Web Services Security
Web Services Security (WS-Security) is a standard for adding authentication, confidentiality, and data integrity to Web services.

WTLS: Wireless Transport Layer Security
Wireless Transport Layer Security (WTLS) is the security level for Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) applications. Based on Transport Layer Security (TLS) v1.0 (a security layer used in the Internet, equivalent to Secure Socket Layer 3.1), WTLS was developed to address the problematic issues surrounding mobile network devices - such as limited processing power and memory capacity, and low bandwidth - and to provide adequate authentication, data integrity, and privacy protection mechanisms.

WWWhack
WWWhack is a tool for cracking password-protected Web sites.