The CIA Triad: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability

By the end of this lesson you can define confidentiality, integrity and availability, give an everyday example of each, and classify a real incident by which of the three it broke. An incident is an event where something in security actually went wrong, such as a break-in, a leak or a service being knocked offline.

Together these three ideas are called the CIA triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability). It has nothing to do with the intelligence agency: the letters are the first letter of each word. A triad is a group of three.