MFA's strength lies in its layered approach. A compromised password alone is no longer enough to grant access. The attacker would also need to steal your physical phone, trick you into giving them a code, or bypass your biometrics, which is a much harder task.

The key difference is that an IPS is an active, "in-line" device. It sits directly in the path of the network traffic and can take immediate action to stop a detected threat, such as dropping the malicious packets or blocking the source IP address. An IDS, in contrast, only detects and alerts.

A firewall serves as a security guard for a network. It inspects incoming and outgoing traffic and decides whether to allow or block specific traffic based on a defined set of security rules.

Signature-based detection is very effective at spotting known threats. Because it is looking for a specific, known pattern, it is highly accurate and is unlikely to mistakenly flag legitimate traffic (low false positives). Its weakness is its inability to detect new threats.

A Certificate Authority is a trusted entity that binds a public key to a specific identity (a person, a company, a website). It does this by issuing a digital certificate, which you can think of as a digital passport, that vouches for the authenticity of the public key.

The main challenge with anomaly-based systems is defining what is "normal." If a legitimate but unusual activity occurs (like a large, one-time data transfer), the system might flag it as an attack, creating a false positive alert that security staff must investigate.

In many systems, password hashes (not the plaintext passwords) are used for authentication. If an attacker can steal this hash from a compromised system, they can reuse it to authenticate to other systems on the network as that user, bypassing the need to crack the password.

The Budapest Convention is a crucial international agreement that provides a framework for countries to develop compatible laws against cybercrime and to establish procedures for international police and judicial cooperation on cybercrime matters.

Encryption is the primary method used to secure data by converting legible plaintext into an unintelligible form called ciphertext. This transformation uses an algorithm and a cryptographic key. The purpose is to protect the confidentiality of the data, ensuring that only individuals with the correct decryption key can revert the ciphertext back into its original, readable plaintext form. Encoding, while also a transformation, is typically used for data formatting or transmission and is not primarily for security against unauthorized access. Decryption is the reverse process of encryption. Hashing is used for data integrity verification, not for making data unreadable and reversible.

A stateful firewall maintains a "state table" of all open connections. This allows it to make more intelligent decisions. For example, it can allow return traffic that is part of an already established connection from the inside, without needing a specific rule for it, while blocking unsolicited inbound traffic.