Cybersecurity Style Guide

Nintendo video game consoles.

A video game hackathon.

A programmable simulation created by mathematician John Conway that featured patterns like pulsars and gliders. Often used to explain algorithms to programming beginners.

Always hyphenate.

LGBTQIA-focused gaming conventions and nonprofit.

Gigabyte. A gigabyte may be 1,000 or 1,024 megabytes. No space between the number and unit, as in 75GB. Do not pluralize GB.

Capitalization matters. GBps is gigabytes per second. Gbps is gigabits per second.

Garbage collection. A type of automatic memory management. Spell out on first use.

Google Cloud Platform.

General Data Protection Regulation. Do not spell out.

A Ruby library. RubyGems are always written in lowercase tech font as in ruby_parser. More guidance at https://guides.rubygems.org/.

A PHP media file parser. ID3 tags refer to media metadata.

An open source reverse engineering tool from the NSA released in 2019. Pronounced “ghee-drah.”

A cyberpunk manga.

Gigahertz. Put a space between the number and the unit, as in “2.4 GHz.”

A fictional mainframe in the 1995 movie Hackers that is “unhackable”… until they hack it.

Graphics Interchange Format. Pronounced “giff” or “jiff.” ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Garbage in, garbage out. Pronounced as “ghee-go” or the whole phrase.

A nonprofit organization that runs clubs and programs to train girls to code. https://girlswhocode.com/

A Linux version control system.

A Bishop Fox tool that helps filter GitHub results.

A service that hosts code repositories.

A tool for managing Git repositories.

Google Kubernetes Engine. Spell out on first use.

A fictional AI who appears in the Portal series of video games.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 is a standard of security for financial institutions. Do not spell out.

Filename or file path identification through pattern matching using wildcards.

Short for “GNU’s Not Unix!” An operating system. GNU is a recursive acronym. Pronounced “guh-noo.”

A programming language. Also called Golang for searchability reasons.

This law of the internet states that all arguments eventually devolve into someone comparing someone to Hitler.

This term is used when researching the programming language Go, which is a difficult keyword to search on its own.

Also known as base image or configuration baseline.

The rate at which useful data is communicated by a network to a given destination.

If you want to be generic, you can also use search online or query a search engine. Informal.

Google Home AI.

Using advanced search queries (dorks) to gather information. Describe briefly in formal writing.

The query engine that searches for things on the internet.

An early application layer protocol that has mostly been replaced by HTTP.

GNU Privacy Guard. Also written as GnuPG. Spell out on first use.

Group Policy Object. Spell out on first use.

Global positioning system. Spell out on first use.

Graphics processing unit.

A woman-focused tech conference named after a programming pioneer.

An open source build tool.

An open source query language. Pronounced as “graff-Q-L.”

An end-of-the-world scenario caused by the proliferation of self-replicating robots who eat the environment so all that is left is grey goo. Also refers to mushy bits of poorly written code. Informal.

Informal.

Describes applications or environments with robust communities that are actively developing new software to augment it.

Stands for “get regular expression.” Can refer to the GNU tool of the same name or mean “to search,” as in “I grepped for secret and found a password in the source code.”

Even though American English uses gray-box and gray hat, greylisting is written with an “-ey” regardless of location.

To fully understand, to get. Informal.

An Apache programming language.

Google’s remote procedure call system. Do not spell out.

Global System for Mobile Communications. Do not spell out.

Hackers who claimed to be behind the 2016 DNC hacks. Pronounced as “goo-chee-fer” or “goo-see-fer.”

Graphical user interface. Pronounced as “gooey” or as letters.

Globally unique identifier. Pronounced “goo-widd.” Spell out on first use.

Google Web Toolkit. Spell out on first use. Pronounced as “gwit.”