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Watering hole attack: A type of attack when a threat actor compromises a website they know their intended victims will visit.

Web Server: A software process that runs on a host computer connected to the Internet to respond to HTTP requests for documents from client web browsers.

Web Based Exploits: Malicious code or behavior that’s used to take advantage of

Whaling: A whaling attack, also known as whaling phishing or a whaling phishing attack, is a specific type of phishing attack that targets high-profile employees, such as the chief executive officer or chief financial officer, in order to steal sensitive information from a company.

White Team: A group responsible for refereeing an engagement between a Red Team of mock attackers and a Blue Team of actual defenders of information systems.

WHOIS: An IP for finding information about resources on networks.

Wide Area Network (WAN): A network that spans a large geographic area like a city, state, or country.

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA): A wireless security protocol for devices to connect to the internet.

Wildcard: A special character that can be substituted with any other character.

Windump: Windump is a freeware tool for Windows that is a protocol analyzer that can monitor network traffic on a wire.

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP): A security protocol for wireless local area networks defined in the standard IEEE 802.11b.

Wireless Application Protocol: A specification for a set of communication protocols to standardize the way that wireless devices, such as cellular telephones and radio transceivers, can be used for Internet access, including e-mail, the World Wide Web, newsgroups, and Internet Relay Chat.

Wireshark: An open-source network protocol analyzer.

Wiretapping: Monitoring and recording data that is flowing between two points in a communication system.

World Wide Web (“the Web”, WWW, W3): The global, hypermedia-based collection of information and services that is available on Internet servers and is accessed by browsers using Hypertext Transfer Protocol and other information retrieval mechanisms.

World-writable File: A file that can be altered by anyone in the world.

Worm:  A computer program that can run independently, can propagate a complete working version of itself onto other hosts on a network, and may consume computer resources destructively. Malware that can duplicate and spread itself across systems on its own.