Threat Definitions

A hacker is a person who creates and modifies computer software and hardware for either negative or positive reasons. Criminal hackers (cybercriminals) create malware in order to commit crimes.

Hacking tools are programs that generally crack or break computer and network security measures. Hacking tools have different capabilities depending on the systems they have been designed to penetrate.

Hacktivism can be described as the use of malicious techniques such as denial of service attacks for political reasons, instead of for monetary gain or personal reasons.

Hash values can be thought of as fingerprints for files. The contents of a file are processed through a cryptographic algorithm, and a unique numerical value – the hash value - is produced that identifies the contents of the file.

Heuristics is a scanning method that looks for malware-like behavior patterns. It is commonly used to detect new or not-yet-known malware.

Hoaxes are emails typically arriving in chain letter fashion that often describe impossible events, highly damaging malware or urban legends. Their intent is to frighten and mislead recipients and get them to forward to friends.

Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is used to transfer information, such as HTML documents, on the Internet.

Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a variation of HTTP that uses the Secure Socket Layer to increase security.