Security Watch
Out of Lepht Phield
Russ has phun with tech phonics.
Recently it seems that more and more silly words are being suggested to add
to our already phull plate of geek-words. The latest penchant is to begin words
with the letters "ph", as in phishing. One security outlet ran a call
for new words that began with "ph", and so I figured I'd take a stab
at defining some just for the phun of it. If you see any of these new words
used in the context I've described, let me know.
Psuedo-legitimate "ph" words:
- Phickle: A buffer overrun attack using the wrong offset.
- Phugitive: New name for malware authors.
- Phacade: The act of changing your response banners to hide the fact
you're still running Sendmail v6 or earlier.
- Phunnelling: A geographically distributed DDoS against a single gateway
router.
Silly "ph" words:
- Phour-hundred and eighty-phive million: The actual number of ph-style
attacks that have already occurred.
- Phairly Phirm: The precision of the above number.
- Phar-Phetched: The chances of a "Digital Pearl Harbor"
occurance.
- Phreak/Phour-Phlusher/Phool: Someone who sits and thinks up ph-words.
- Phreaking: The act of using ph-words in media interviews.
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Phunny: What people who use ph-words in media interviews sound like
to the average consumer.
- Phony/Phoolish/Phull-of-it: What people who use ph-words in media
interviews sound like to the average IT security person.
- Phoible: A way to describe a person's habit of using ph-words.
- Phly-by-night: The average duration of any company that uses ph-words
in its marketing too often.
- Phable: Story about someone you know who actually succumbed to a
phishing attempt.
- Phace-off: Phishing war.
- Phail-safe: The act of cutting the wire during a phishing attack.
- Phall-out: The results of a phishing attack.
- Phan-Phare: Tooting your own horn by coming up with a new ph-word.
- PhBI/PhDA/PhDIC, etc.: Government phishing attempts.
- Phatherland: Origin of a phishing scam.
Now, after all that, do you really think we need more "ph" words
or should we try a new prefix or suffix? Seems we've done prefixes to death
("e" anything, "i" anything, etc.), so maybe it's time for
a suffix for a change. "Ware" has been overused, so who's got a good
suggestion?
About the Author
Russ Cooper is a senior information security analyst with Verizon Business, Inc.
He's also founder and editor of NTBugtraq, www.ntbugtraq.com,
one of the industry's most influential mailing lists dedicated to Microsoft security.
One of the world's most-recognized security experts, he's often quoted by major
media outlets on security issues.