28 terms, plain English
Every term, decoded once.
The vocabulary that shows up in a Cyber Readiness Assessment, a board pack, or an insurer’s renewal questionnaire — defined without jargon, and linked through to the page that addresses it.
A
- Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)
- A sustained, well-resourced intrusion where an attacker establishes long-term, quiet access to a network rather than a single smash-and-grab event. APTs favour patience over noise, which is why baseline monitoring — not just antivirus — is what eventually finds them.See how we monitor for intrusions
- AML/CTF ActAnti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006
- Australian legislation requiring financial and accounting businesses to verify customer identity, monitor transactions, and report suspicious activity. It carries its own data-security expectations layered on top of the Privacy Act.Financial & Accounting obligations
- APRA CPS 234
- The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority's information-security standard for APRA-regulated entities, requiring board-level accountability for cyber resilience, incident notification, and third-party security assurance.Financial & Accounting obligations
- Attack Surface
- Every point where an attacker could attempt to enter or extract data from your systems — internet-facing servers, employee mailboxes, remote-access tools, cloud tenancies, and connected vendors. Reducing it is often cheaper than defending it.See GMAN Shield's core controls
- Awareness Training
- Structured, ongoing education that teaches staff to recognise phishing, business-email compromise, and social-engineering attempts. A once-off induction session does not count — the businesses with the fewest incidents run it on a schedule.Security Awareness Training
B
- Backup & Disaster Recovery (BDR)
- The combination of tested, immutable data backups and a documented plan to restore operations after an outage or ransomware event. A backup that has never been restored, or that ransomware can also encrypt, is not disaster recovery.Backup & Disaster Recovery services
- Business Email Compromise (BEC)
- An attack in which a criminal impersonates or hijacks a trusted email account — often a supplier's — to redirect a payment or extract sensitive data. BEC rarely involves malware; it exploits trust in a relationship, not a technical flaw.Read the $40,000 invoice fraud case study
D
- Dark Web Monitoring
- Continuous surveillance of the forums and marketplaces where stolen credentials and company data are bought and sold, so a leaked password is found and rotated before an attacker uses it.Dark Web Monitoring service
- Data Breach
- Unauthorised access to, disclosure of, or loss of personal or business information. Under Australian law, a breach likely to cause serious harm triggers the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, regardless of how it happened.See the live threat picture
- Disaster Recovery Plan
- A documented, rehearsed procedure for restoring systems and data after an outage, ransomware event, or disaster. The plan is only as good as the last time it was actually tested against a realistic scenario.Incident Response services
E
- Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR)
- Enterprise-grade software that monitors laptops, desktops, and servers for suspicious behaviour and can isolate a compromised device automatically. Consumer antivirus checks files against known signatures; EDR watches behaviour in real time.Endpoint Protection service
- Essential Eight
- The Australian Signals Directorate's baseline of eight mitigation strategies — including patching, application control, and MFA — designed to make a network substantially harder to compromise. A common reference point for compliance-mapped security.Compliance Consulting service
I
- Incident Response Plan
- A documented, rehearsed set of steps for the first hours and days after a suspected security incident — who is notified, what is contained first, and how the Notifiable Data Breaches clock is managed. Rehearsed plans are used correctly; unrehearsed ones are read for the first time during the incident.Incident Response service
M
- Managed Detection & Response (MDR)
- A 24/7 service that monitors your environment for signs of intrusion and acts on them — not just logs them for someone to review later. The distinction between MDR and a dashboard nobody watches is often the entire difference between prevention and post-mortem.Threat Detection & Response service
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)MFA
- A login requirement combining something you know (a password) with something you have (a code, an app, a key). Enforced MFA blocks the overwhelming majority of credential-based attacks — it is the single highest-leverage control on this list.Run the free 3-minute risk assessment
N
- Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) Scheme
- A Privacy Act mechanism requiring notification to the OAIC and affected individuals when a data breach is likely to result in serious harm. The 30-day assessment clock starts the moment you suspect a breach, not once you have confirmed it.Read the Privacy Act guide
P
- Patch Management
- The scheduled process of applying security updates to software and systems before a known vulnerability is exploited. “Ad hoc, when we remember” is the most common gap our assessments find.GMAN Shield inclusions
- Penetration TestingPen Testing
- An authorised, simulated attack against your own environment, run the way a real adversary would, to find exploitable gaps before one does. Distinct from a vulnerability scan, which lists weaknesses without attempting to exploit them.Penetration Testing service
- Phishing
- A deceptive email, message, or website designed to trick someone into revealing credentials or installing malware. Still the single most common entry point for a serious incident, which is why awareness training and email security are paired controls.Email Security service
- Privacy Act 1988
- The core Australian legislation governing how organisations collect, use, and secure personal information, enforced through the Australian Privacy Principles. Almost every business holding client or staff data carries obligations under it.Read the plain-English Privacy Act guide
R
- Ransomware
- Malicious software that encrypts a victim's files and demands payment for the decryption key. The single control that most reliably neutralises it is a tested, immutable, offline-capable backup an attacker cannot also encrypt.Backup & Disaster Recovery service
S
- Security Operations Centre (SOC)
- The team and systems responsible for continuously monitoring an environment for threats and coordinating a response. Smaller businesses typically access SOC capability through a managed provider rather than building one in-house.Threat Detection & Response service
- SIEMSecurity Information and Event Management
- A platform that aggregates logs from across an environment — mailboxes, servers, firewalls — and correlates them to surface anomalies a single log alone would not reveal. A core Fortress capability for businesses that need audit-grade visibility.See what Fortress adds
T
- Threat Intelligence
- Evidence-based information about active and emerging threats — malicious infrastructure, exploited vulnerabilities, and attacker behaviour — used to prioritise defensive effort toward what is actually happening, not a hypothetical worst case.See the live threat dashboard
V
- vCISOVirtual Chief Information Security Officer
- Senior security leadership provided on a fractional, ongoing basis — setting strategy, reporting to the board, and directing remediation — for businesses that need the role without a full-time executive hire.See what Fortress adds
- Vulnerability Scanning
- An automated review of systems against known weaknesses, run on a schedule so newly disclosed vulnerabilities are found and closed before an attacker locates them. A quarterly minimum for any regulated business.GMAN Shield inclusions
Z
- Zero Trust
- A security model that verifies every user and device on every access attempt, rather than assuming anything inside the network perimeter is safe by default. The practical opposite of “once you're on the network, you're trusted.”Network Management service
Knowing the terms is a start. Knowing your own gaps is the point.
The Cyber Readiness Assessment maps every term above to your own environment, in ten business days.