Dictionary of Information Security

W

wabbit

(term almost certainly derived from Elmer Fudd s repeated line, You wascawwy wabbit! in the Looney Tunes cartoon series) mythical program reported, circa 1978, on a System/360 computer. The concept may have descended from a program called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 55000 at the University of Washington Computer Center. The program would allegedly make two copies of itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the system. (The existence of the two reported programs has not been confirmed.) See rabbit.

waiver

permission to operate while not in compliance. Depending on who does the permitting, and what you aren t complying with, lawyers may salivate when this happens.

walk

traversal of a data structure, especially an array or linked-list data structure in memory. In forensic programming, it is common to walk the code looking for modules, jumps, and operations: in computer forensics, frequently a utility will walk the disk checking for lost or apparently invalid pointers to data. (Walking the disk should not be confused with walking drives, which was the practice of establishing a resonant frequency for moving [large] drive heads in old [large] disk drives, thus causing the drives to incrementally move across the floor.)

wannabe

individual who wants to be accorded a higher status than he or she actually holds or rates.

Frequently seen in areas of the blackhat communities, where warez d00dz wannabe virus writers, virus writers wannabe script kiddiez, script kiddiez wannabe crackers, and crackers wannabe hackers.

warchalking

similar...

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