This glossary is from Learning Ransomware Response & Recovery by W. Curtis Preston and Dr. Mike Saylor. Browse all letters of the glossary or get the book.
Wall of Shame – Website maintained by ransomware groups publicly listing victims who haven’t paid ransoms, or dark web leak sites where ransomware gangs publish stolen data from victims who don’t pay.
WannaCry – 2017 ransomware worm that used EternalBlue exploit to spread autonomously, infecting 300,000+ computers in 150 countries.
War Game – Hands-on simulation where teams practice responding to active cyber attacks in realistic scenarios with live systems and time pressure.
Warm Site – Disaster recovery facility with systems partially configured and ready, requiring some setup time before operation.
Wiping – Complete overwrite of all storage sectors including boot areas, partition tables, and unallocated space to guarantee malware removal.
Wireshark – Free network protocol analyzer for capturing and examining network traffic to identify C2 communications or data exfiltration.
WORM (Write Once Read Many) – Storage technology preventing data modification or deletion, used for immutable logs and backups.
Write Blocker – Forensic hardware or software that prevents modifications to storage devices during evidence collection.