W-Z

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War

An event characterized by the open, total, and (relatively) unrestricted prosecution of warfare by lethal means. As such, war is not synonymous with warfare.

War dialer

A cracking tool, a program that calls a given list or range of numbers and records those that answer with handshake tones (and so might be entry points to computer or telecommunications systems).

Warfare

The set of all lethal and nonlethal activities undertaken to subdue the hostile will of an adversary or enemy. The distinction between this and war ties into the delineation of information warfare as an activity, which could or should be conducted outside the situational frame of war itself.

Warm boot

Rebooting a system by means of a software command as opposed to turning the power off and on. See also cold boot.

Wizard

A wizard is a series of dialog boxes that guides you step by step through a procedure.

Web-based Telnet

Invoke a telnet session directly from your web browser. There’s no need for any other applications or software.

Windows swap files

Windows swap files are relied on by Windows, Windows 95, and Windows 98 to create “virtual memory” (using a portion of the hard disk drive for memory operations). The storage area is important to the computer forensics specialist for the same reason that file slack and unallocated space are important (large volumes of data exist for which the computer user likely has no knowledge). Windows swap files can be temporary or permanent, depending on the version of Windows involved and settings selected by the computer user. Permanent swap files are of more interest to a computer forensics specialist because they normally store larger amounts of information for much longer periods of time.

World-Wide Web

The World-Wide Web, or WWW, is the part of the Internet that you’re using to view a particular Web page. The Web is just a set of protocols, or standards, for transferring data from one computer to another; just one aspect of the Internet, but by far the most popular. Telnet, FTP, Veronica, and Archie are some other Internet data-transfer protocols. Without protocols, computers wouldn’t be able to communicate with or understand each other.

Worm

A class of mischievous or disruptive software whose negative effect is primarily realized through rampant proliferation (via replication and distribution of the worm’s own code). Replication is the hallmark of the worm. Worm code is relatively host-independent, in that the code is self-contained enough to migrate across multiple instances of a given platform, or across multiple platforms over a network (network worm). To replicate itself, a worm needs to spawn a process; this implies that worms require a multitasking operating system to thrive. A program or executable code module that resides in distributed systems or networks. It will replicate itself, if necessary, in order to exercise as much of the systems’ resources as possible for its own processing. Such resources may take the form of CPU time, I/O channels, or system memory. It will replicate itself from machine to machine across network connections, often clogging networks and computer systems as it spreads.

Zip

To zip (notice the lower case z) a file is to compress it into an archive so that it occupies less disk space.

Zip archive

An archive of one or more Zip-compressed files. When used as a noun, Zip is typically capitalized. Compressed files can come in many formats besides Zip.

Zip file

A Zip archive that Windows presents as a single file. In general, the contents cannot be accessed unless the archive is decompressed, except when you are running ZipMagic 2000.

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