Whaling
When people launching spear phishing attacks against senior members of staff, this is known as whaling (because they’re after the big fish). That’s the only real difference in the terms, though the types of attack may differ slightly.
Whales are more likely to be the target for mandate fraud, where an email purporting to be from eg the Chief Executive of an organisation goes to the Finance Director, or Finance team, asking them to make an urgent payment to a particular bank account.
White Hat
Ethical hackers, ie those who carry out lawful penetration tests with written permission from a client, are often called white hats. This is because they’re the good guys: hackers who attack without permission are black hats. The name comes from 50s and 60s films set in the Wild West, where the colour of the cowboy’s hat told you whether they were good or bad.
WiFi
Wireless connections to computers often use WiFi (rather than Bluetooth). Good practice dictates that the WiFi connections should be encrypted, using WPA2 encryption. WEP and WPA are both weak encryption prpotocols and should not be used.
Worm
A worm is a form of malware which replicates iteself in order to infect the computer it is on and any others it can find.
Easy Cyber 