The principles and standards that guide people’s behavior toward others. The rules that govern personal conduct. Several organizations have recognized the need for standard ethics rules, or codes, and have devised guidelines for ethical behavior. These rules are not laws but are minimum standards for professional behavior. They should provide you with a basis for sound, professional, ethical judgment.

A trigger for an activity. Occurrence, not yet assessed, that may affect the performance of an information system.

A system that seeks to embody the accumulated knowledge of humankind on a particular subject and apply it in a consistent fashion to future decisions. The application of computerbased artificial intelligence in areas of specialized knowledge.

An information security "exposure" is a system configuration issue or a mistake in software that allows access to information or capabilities that can be used by a hacker as a steppingstone into a system or network. The condition of being exposed to asset loss because of a threat. Exposure involves being susceptible to the exploitation of a vulnerability by a threat agent or event. The potential loss to an area due to the occurrence of an adverse event.

A markup language that defines rules of document formatting and encoding that is both human and machine readable. Designed to enable the use of SGML on the World Wide Web, XML is a regular markup language that defines what you can do (or what you have done) in the way of describing information for a fixed class of documents (like HTML). XML goes beyond this and allows you to define your own customized markup language. It can do this because it is an application profile of SGML. XML is a metalanguage, a language for describing languages.

A cross between the Internet and an intranet. An extranet is a section of an organization’s network that has been sectioned off so that it acts as an intranet for the private network but also serves information to a limited number of specific outsiders. Often access into an extranet from the Internet requires a VPN connection. Extranets are often used in B2B applications, between customers and suppliers. An intranet that is restricted to an organization and certain outsiders, such as customers and suppliers. Extension to the intranet allowing selected outside users access to portions of an organization’s intranet.

Automatic protection of programs and/or processing systems when hardware or software failure is detected. The automatic termination and protection of programs or other processing operations when a hardware, software, or firmware failure is detected in a computer system.

Selective termination of affected nonessential processing when hardware or software failure is determined to be imminent. The selective termination of nonessential processing affected by a hardware, software, or firmware failure in a computer system.

Type of incident in which unauthorized access to data results from hardware or software failure. Unauthorized and usually inadvertent access to data resulting from a hardware, software, or firmware failure in the computer system.

Methodology used to detect imminent hardware or software failure and provide fail safe or fail soft recovery. The methodology used to detect and provide failsafe or failsoft recovery from hardware, software, or firmware failure in a computer system.