Cybersecurity Style Guide

Failure as a service or function as a service. Spell out on first use to avoid confusion.

A social media platform founded by Mark Zuckerberg and others in 2004.

Informal.

An Apple videoconferencing product.

Always hyphenate.

Apple DRM technology.

A piece of evidence (e.g., an old digital certificate) planted by hackers to deliberately mislead investigators about their identity.

Frequently asked questions. Pronounced as letters or “fack.” Write “an FAQ” in formal writing.

To teleport from one area of a video game to another.

To make a typo on a mobile device by pressing a nearby button. Informal.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Federal Communications Commission.

The Food and Drug Administration.

Full disk encryption. Also called whole disk encryption. Spell out on first use.

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974. Protects the privacy of student education records. Spell out on first use.

When referring to the specific HTTP request type, do not use as a verb.

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. Spell out on first use.

If writing about a type of field, use the normal font. If it’s a named field, use the tech font, as in ”the address field.”

Among other things, it protects U.S. individuals from self-incrimination.

Use all caps if writing only the letters. Use lowercase in the tech font if writing the dot form. The dot is spoken aloud, as in “dot-E-X-E,” so when writing the dot form, use “a” instead of “an” before it.

Use the tech font when citing full filenames with their extensions.

Use the tech font to show file paths, as in C:\Users\Fox\Downloads\fox.gif.

An international criminal hacker organization targeting payment card data.

A network protocol.

A unique public key identifier. Use the tech font, as in “the SubjectPublicKeyInfo fingerprint.”

Short for financial technology. Corporate jargon; use sparingly.

Federal Information Processing Standards.

An Amazon media player.

Failures in time rate. One FIT is equivalent to one failure per billion hours, as in “1,000 FITs.” Briefly define on first use.

A mathematical pattern game sometimes used as a test in coding interviews.

A Boolean variable that signals a function or process to another program. Flags are often considered set or true if present. Use the tech font, as in “the HttpOnly flag.”

An Adobe media player.

The supreme deity in the facetious religion of Pastafarianism, which was founded in 2005.

The Freedom of Information Act.

Foobar, foo, and bar are commonly used as placeholder variables in computer science courses.

A programming language.

A network authentication protocol.

Bishop Fox employees.

First-person shooter. A type of video game. Pluralize as FPS games.

Frames per second. Put a space between the number and the unit, as in “60 fps.”

Fully qualified domain name. Spell out on first use.

Write frameworks in the normal font, as in AngularJS, React, and MVC-based framework.

Factoring RSA Export Keys. A cryptographic attack. Do not spell out.

Describes an app or service that is initially free to use but costs money to unlock crucial features.

A nonprofit organization.

A pen testing tool.

A fictional Anonymous-type organization from the USA TV show Mr. Robot.

The Federal Trade Commission.

“Faster than light” warp drives in the TV show Battlestar Galactica and other sci-fi.

File Transfer Protocol. Do not spell out.

FTP Secure. An extension to the FTP standard.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Pronounced “fudd.”

A package of PII that can be bought on the black market. It usually includes SSN, DOB, and full name.

Corporate jargon. Better to describe specific functions or features.

Use the normal font, as in F1 and F8.

Capitalize the name of a function as in “the Forgot Password function.”

A fuzzer generates or mutates input for consumption by the target program with the intention of finding bugs.

A framework that handles the crashes that result from a fuzzer.

Logic that is equipped to handle multiple truth values, as opposed to Boolean logic.

Feature eXtraction Language. Spell out on first use.