Master Cybersecurity Fundamentals and Threats: 111 Flashcards on Malware, Spoofing and Defense in Depth
Master cybersecurity basics with 111 flashcards: CIA triad, malware types, DDoS, spoofing, phishing, privilege escalation, least privilege, TPM, RBAC and 2FA.
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Memorize 50 Cybersecurity Terms: DoS, MITM, Social Engineering and the CIA Triad
Deck OZ5810 promises encryption but delivers an attack glossary. Here is how to drill its 50 cards on malware, the six spoofing families and defence in depth.
Cybersecurity vocabulary is a trap for beginners: the terms sound similar (spoofing, phishing, spear-phishing, water holing), stack on top of each other (DoS, DDoS, DRDoS) and get tested word-for-word in CompTIA Security+, CISSP prep and university intro courses. The Cybersecurity: Fundamentals & Threats deck on Flip It (deck code DQ9806, 111 cards) covers the whole foundation: what a vulnerability is, every major attack family, and the defensive principles and hardware controls that answer them.
Study this deck: Cybersecurity: Fundamentals & Threats
1 / 10Computer security
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
The deck at a glance
Four blocks of cards, roughly in this order:
- Core concepts: computer security vs information security, vulnerability, exploitable vulnerability, the CVE database, backdoors, countermeasures, the CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity, availability).
- Attacks: DoS, DDoS, DRDoS, botnets, direct-access attacks, eavesdropping, TEMPEST, malware (virus, worm, Trojan, RAT, spyware, keylogger, scareware, ransomware), man-in-the-middle, IP/DNS/email/MAC/ARP spoofing, SSL hijacking, phishing, spear-phishing, water holing, Business Email Compromise, horizontal and vertical privilege escalation, side-channel and cold boot attacks, DMA attacks, Evil Maid, HTML smuggling, multi-vector polymorphic attacks.
- Defenses and design: security by design, principle of least privilege, defense in depth, audit trails, full disclosure, firewalls, IDS, vulnerability scanners, penetration tests, forward web proxies, system hardening, two-factor authentication, ACLs, RBAC, mandatory vs discretionary access control, capability-based security, formal verification (seL4, PikeOS).
- Hardware and people: TPM, USB dongles, drive locks, case intrusion detection, IOMMU, Physical Unclonable Functions, disabling USB ports, security awareness training, inoculation, information security culture and its five management steps.
Eight cards from the deck
| Front | Back (abridged) |
|---|---|
| Worms differ from viruses | Worms self-replicate and spread without human interaction; viruses only run when a user executes a compromised program |
| RAT | Remote Access Trojan: creates a secret backdoor allowing remote control of the device |
| ARP spoofing | Spoofed ARP messages associate the attacker's MAC address with another host's IP, redirecting data to the attacker |
| Business Email Compromise (BEC) | Attackers impersonate executives in emails to finance staff to urgently request fund transfers |
| Cold boot attack | A side-channel attack exploiting residual effects on RAM cells to extract data |
| Defense in depth | More than one subsystem must be violated to compromise system integrity and data |
| TEMPEST | NSA specification for attacks that eavesdrop by monitoring faint electromagnetic emissions from hardware |
| Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) | Restricting access by user role; used by most enterprises with 500+ employees |
How to study the attack cards
Sort every attack by the layer it hits. The deck's attacks fall into five buckets: network (ARP, IP and DNS spoofing, SSL hijacking, MITM, eavesdropping), software (virus, worm, Trojan, ransomware, HTML smuggling), physical (direct-access, Evil Maid, cold boot, DMA, TEMPEST), human (phishing, spear-phishing, BEC, scareware, water holing) and availability (DoS, DDoS, DRDoS). When you flip a card, name the bucket before the definition. It turns 40 isolated terms into five short lists, and it is exactly how exam questions ask you to pick "the most appropriate control".
Pair each attack with its counter-card. The deck already contains the answers: eavesdropping → VPN and HTTPS; direct-access and boot-from-media → disk encryption and TPM; social engineering → inoculation and awareness training; privilege escalation → least privilege and RBAC; infected USB dongles (the deck's "most common hardware threat") → disabling USB ports. Reviewing them as pairs means one card reinforces the other.
Numbers and names worth memorizing
The deck includes a handful of specifics that examiners love: more than 90% of security incidents involve human error; Carnivore and NarusInSight are FBI/NSA eavesdropping programs; seL4 and PikeOS are formally verified operating systems; Common Criteria (CC) is the usual certification for a secure OS; Apache Hadoop is used as a big data platform for detecting advanced persistent threats; the E language implements capability-based security at the language level.
A dozen concepts (CVE, botnet, TEMPEST, RAT, 2FA) reappear near the end of the deck with different wording: treat them as a built-in retest.
Get the deck
Log in at flip-it.app and search the library for Cybersecurity: Fundamentals & Threats (code DQ9806). For the systems side of the same syllabus, see our guides to operating systems fundamentals and computer and smartphone hardware.
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