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Glossary

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Anti Phishing Working Group: An association of market players fighting against on-line frauds.
Visit its site: http://www.antiphishing.org/ (in English).
Anti-spam: Software enabling spams to be detected and filtered.
Antispyware: Software designed to detect and remove spyware likely to be present on your computer.
Antivirus: Software designed to scan, detect and remove computer viruses and other malware.
Authentification: Procedure aiming at obtaining proof of a user's identity in order to then control access rights.
Certification Authority (CA): The CA is a trusted third party able to generate, issue and revoke digital certificates. The standard Internet navigators (e.g. Internet Explorer) have a natively integrated list of trustworthy authorities.
CNIL: («Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés», the French data protection agency) - The CNIL is an independent administrative authority responsible for making sure personal data is protected. It produces recommendations concerning adapting legislative or regulatory measures to the information society and informs citizens of their rights.
Computer virus: Malicious computer programs able to infect files by modifying them so as to embed a copy of themselves. They need third-party «hosts» to propagate themselves; these may be Word or Excel files, executable files, scripts, startup sectors, etc. Viruses cannot operate autonomously, i.e. the infected file must be opened for it to be able to operate.
Cookie: A small data package sent by an Internet server and kept by the navigator. A cookie can have a number of purposes: maintain a web site's secured session (for example, on-line banking), keep data about the user to make navigation easier (language, colour, format), track the user's behaviour, etc.
Cracker: (or «computer pirate») someone who uses their knowledge of computers to illegally gain access to a computer network and confidential data.
Note: in everyday language, the term «hacker» is sometimes used to refer to a «cracker».
DNS: (Abbreviation of Domain Name Service).
Each computer connected directly to the Internet has at least one IP address of its own. However, users do not want to work with numeric addresses of the type 194.153.205.26 but with a domain name or more explicit addresses (known as FQDN – Fully Qualified Domain Name – addresses) that take a form such as this: www.commentcamarche.net.
Consequently, it is possible to associate names in everyday language with numeric addresses thanks to a system called the DNS (Domain Name Service).
The correlation between IP addresses and their associated domain names is called domain name resolution (or address resolution).

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