Glossary

Credential-Theft Scoping

Credential-theft scoping determines which passwords, sessions, tokens, keys, identities, and downstream accounts may have been exposed using endpoint, memory, network, identity-provider, application, and policy evidence.

Credentialed Scanning

Authorized vulnerability or configuration assessment using an authenticated account to inspect target state beyond what an unauthenticated network view can observe.

Crisis Communication

Communicating during a major disruption covered by a business continuity plan, keeping employees, customers, partners, and the public informed accurately and calmly while operations are degraded or down, to limit harm and maintain trust.

Crisis External Communication

Communicating with outside parties, customers, regulators, media, and the public, during a major incident, managed by incident leadership to inform stakeholders accurately while protecting the organization legally and reputationally.

Critical Finding Escalation

Critical finding escalation sends a verified, time-sensitive security condition through a pre-agreed channel before the final report so the owner can contain exposure safely.

Crontab

The configuration that schedules recurring jobs on Linux and Unix systems. Because it runs commands automatically on a schedule, attackers abuse it as a persistence mechanism by adding a malicious scheduled task.

Cross-Account Access

Granting identities in one cloud account permission to access resources in another, typically via role assumption and trust policies. It enables shared services and centralized management but, if too broad, can let an attacker pivot between accounts.

Cross-Border Data Transfer

Moving personal or regulated data across national boundaries in the cloud, which triggers legal requirements about where data may go and how it must be protected. It is a core cloud compliance concern driven by data-protection laws.

Cross-Border Data Transfer Requirements

The specific legal mechanisms and obligations, under privacy laws like the GDPR, that must be satisfied to lawfully move personal data across borders, such as adequacy decisions, standard contractual clauses, and supplementary safeguards.

Cross-Cutting Concerns

Security and operational requirements that apply across all services in a cloud-native system rather than to one component, such as authentication, secrets management, observability, and resilience, best handled consistently rather than reimplemented per service.

Cross-Functional Communication

A SOC analyst's communication with teams outside the SOC, IT, engineering, legal, management, and affected business units, to gather context, coordinate response, and escalate effectively. Much of an analyst's impact depends on it.

Cross-Functional Risk

Risk that spans multiple departments or functions and cannot be owned or managed by one team alone, such as a risk involving IT, legal, and operations together, requiring coordination across the organization to address.

Cross-Organization Trust

Cross-organization trust lets one organization rely on selected identity or device claims issued by another organization under explicit policy.

Cross-Reference Analysis

Cross-reference analysis follows code and data references from a known string, import, resource, constant, function, or address to determine where and how it is used.

Cross-Site Request Forgery

An attack that causes a user's browser to send an unwanted authenticated request.

Cross-Site Scripting Verification

Cross-site scripting verification traces untrusted data from source to an executable browser context and distinguishes harmless reflection from actual script-capable interpretation.

Cross-Source Correlation

An analyst skill of combining evidence from different data sources, endpoint, network, identity, and cloud logs, to build a complete picture of an event that no single source reveals on its own.

Cross-System SoD

Separation of duties enforced across multiple systems, ensuring that a combination of access spread over different applications does not let one person complete a sensitive process alone, even when no single system shows a conflict.

Cryptographic File Hashing

Cryptographic file hashing computes a digest such as SHA-256 that identifies exact bytes and supports integrity checks, deduplication, correlation, and evidence tracking.

Cryptographic Goal

The security property a cryptographic design is intended to support, such as confidentiality, integrity, origin authentication, key establishment, or controlled pseudorandomness.

Cryptography

The science of protecting information using mathematical techniques, providing confidentiality through encryption, integrity through hashing, and authenticity and non-repudiation through signatures. It underpins nearly all modern security.

Cryptojacking

The unauthorized use of compromised computing resources to mine cryptocurrency, common in cloud-native environments where attackers hijack cluster compute. It steals capacity and runs up costs rather than stealing data.

Cryptomining Incident Response

The response to a cryptomining (cryptojacking) incident in the cloud, confirming the unauthorized mining, scoping how the attacker got in, containing and removing the mining workloads, and closing the entry point, often using a predefined playbook.

Culture Assessment Process

A structured way to evaluate an organization's security culture, combining surveys, behavioral indicators, and other signals to understand how people actually think about and act on security, and where the culture needs strengthening.

Culture Program ROI

An evidence-based comparison of a security-culture program's attributable costs and benefits, with assumptions, uncertainty, side effects, and alternative explanations stated.

Culture Survey Design

Crafting surveys that accurately measure security attitudes and culture, with questions worded to avoid bias, elicit honest answers, and capture the dimensions of culture that matter, so the results genuinely reflect how people think.

Curriculum Structure

How a security awareness program organizes its training content over time, sequencing topics, tailoring to roles, and reinforcing through repetition, so learning builds coherently rather than being a one-off annual session.

Customer Cloud Configuration

Customer cloud configuration includes the identity, data, network, encryption, service, workload, telemetry, backup, recovery, and integration settings controlled by the customer.

Customer Communication

Communicating with affected customers during an incident, informing them accurately about impact and required actions while meeting obligations and preserving trust, coordinated carefully because what is said carries legal and reputational weight.

Customer Compliance Scope

The portion of cloud compliance obligations that fall to the customer rather than the provider under the shared-responsibility model, the controls the customer must implement, operate, and evidence for their own configuration and use.

Customer Journey and Security

Customer journey and security map registration, verification, authentication, consent, transaction, recovery, profile change, linking, support, suspension, and closure as controlled state transitions.