Today's letter of the day in the Networking ABC's is the letter "M".  Unlike it's siblings MD5, MAC, and Monitor, today's word is actually a phrase that is important when privacy is concerned.  Today's word(s) is(are) "Man in the Middle".

"M" is for Man in the Middle

Man in the Middle

Pronounced: Man-in-th-uh-mid-l

The man-in-the-middle attack (also known as a bucket-brigade attack and abbreviated MITM) is a form of active eavesdropping in which the attacker makes independent connections with the victims and relays messages between them, making them believe that they are talking directly to each other over a private connection when in fact the entire conversation is controlled by the attacker.  Possible defenses against MITM attacks use authentication techniques that are based on Public Key infrastructures, mutual authentication, secret keys, passwords, and other criteria such as voice recognition or other biometrics.