Cybersecurity refers to the protection of information systems (hardware, software and associated infrastructure), the data on them, and the services they provide, from unauthorized access, harm or misuse. This includes harm caused intentionally by the operator of the system, or accidentally, as a result of failing to follow security procedures.

Preservation of confidentiality, integrity and availability of information.

In addition, other properties, such as authenticity, accountability, non-repudiation, and reliability can also be involved.

Confidentiality refers to protecting information from being accessed by unauthorized parties. In other words, only the people who are authorized to do so can gain access to sensitive data.

Imagine your bank records. You should be able to access them, of course, and employees at the bank who are helping you with a transaction should be able to access them, but no one else should. A failure to maintain confidentiality means that someone who shouldn’t have access has managed to get it, through intentional behavior or by accident.

Such a failure of confidentiality, commonly known as a breach, typically cannot be remedied. Once the secret has been revealed, there’s no way to un-reveal it. If your bank records are posted on a public website, everyone can know your bank account number, balance, etc., and that information can’t be erased from their minds, papers, computers, and other places. Nearly all the major security incidents reported in the media today involve major losses of confidentiality.

Integrity refers to ensuring the authenticity of information—that information is not altered, and that the source of the information is genuine. Imagine that you have a website and you sell products on that site. Now imagine that an attacker can shop on your web site and maliciously alter the prices of your products, so that they can buy anything for whatever price they choose. That would be a failure of integrity, because your information—in this case, the price of a product—has been altered and you didn’t authorize this alteration.

Another example of a failure of integrity is when you try to connect to a website and a malicious attacker between you and the website redirects your traffic to a different website. In this case, the site you are directed to is not genuine.

Nonrepudiation ensures that the subject of an activity or who caused an event cannot deny that the event occurred. Nonrepudiation prevents a subject from claiming not to have sent a message, not to have performed an action, or not to have been the cause of an event.

Nonrepudiation is made possible through identification, authentication, authorization, accountability, and auditing. Nonrepudiation can be established using digital certificates, session identifiers, transaction logs, and numerous other transactional and access control mechanisms. A system built without proper enforcement of nonrepudiation does not provide verification that a specific entity performed a certain action. Nonrepudiation is an essential part of accountability. A suspect cannot be held accountable if they can repudiate the claim against them.

For any information system to serve its purpose, the information must be available when it is needed. This means the computing systems used to store and process the information, the security controls used to protect it, and the communication channels used to access it must be functioning correctly.

Ensuring availability also involves preventing denial-of-service attacks, such as a flood of incoming messages to the target system, essentially forcing it to shut down.