English

Adjective

air-gapped ‎(not comparable)

1. (Of a computer) Being unconnected to the internet.
   • 13 August 2013, Peter Maass, How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets, The New York Times:

     In addition to encrypting any sensitive e-mails, she began using different computers for editing film, for communicating and for reading sensitive documents (the one for sensitive documents is air-gapped, meaning it has never been connected to the Internet).

   • 2016, Kim Zetter, "Clever Attack Uses the Sound of a Computer’s Fan to Steal Data", Wired, 28 June 2016.

     In the past two years a group of researchers in Israel has become highly adept at stealing data from air-gapped computers—those machines prized by hackers that, for security reasons, are never connected to the internet or connected to other machines that are connected to the internet, making it difficult to extract data from them.

Related terms

• air gap

References

• Kim Zetter, "Hacker Lexicon: What Is an Air Gap?", Wired, 8 December 2014.