You can define Threat modelling as a structured approach to identify and assess the risks, hazards, and vulnerabilities of a company. The company examines the likelihood of each potential hazard and measures its preparedness to deal with these threats. Check out our online course for cyber security to learn more.
How does threat modelling work?
Threat modelling is the process of assessing potential hazards and threats to an organisation’s security. This is frequently performed by utilising a threat modelling framework, which provides a standardised method of assessing hazards and decreases the danger of oversight.
Some of the most often used threat modelling frameworks are:
- STRIDE: A threat modelling methodology for identifying and categorising threats. The acronym stands for common threats including spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, and privilege elevation.
- PASTA: The Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis (PASTA) is a risk-based paradigm that focuses on business impacts. It uses a seven-step iterative method to detect possible hazards to the organisation.
- DREAD: DREAD is intended to assist with the quantification and prioritising of threats to an organisation. The acronym represents Damage, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected Users, and Discoverability.
Different frameworks are created for specific scenarios. The appropriate framework for a particular activity may be determined by the use case and the threat modelling team’s preferences.
Why is Threat modelling necessary?
Organisations encounter a wide range of security threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities. As corporate IT environments and systems become increasingly diverse and sophisticated, identifying and responding to potential threats becomes more difficult. Organisations encounter threats from both inside and outside the organisation.
Threat modelling is significant because it provides an organisation with greater visibility into the potential dangers it confronts. A structured threat modelling methodology allows a security team to ask precise questions about the potential dangers to each system. This more systematic method can help them uncover security threats that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Once an organisation has identified possible threats and risks, it can devise strategies for prioritising and addressing them. The final result is a more robust security posture in which newly recognized threats are mitigated, controlled, or accepted.
Benefits of Threat Modelling
Threat modelling is a crucial exercise that the corporate cybersecurity team should carry out on a regular basis.
Some of the advantages that it can bring to the firm include the following:
- Greater Risk Visibility: The fundamental goal of threat modelling is to provide a more thorough knowledge of the risks and threats that a business faces. This increased risk visibility can help a business make better security investments and manage cybersecurity risks.
- Accurate risk assessment: The only way the security team of a company can protect the organisation from security dangers is if it is aware of. Threat modelling gives a more accurate estimation of an organisation’s risk by encouraging and empowering the security team to discover prospective hazards and threats that might otherwise go unnoticed.
- Enhanced Cybersecurity Posture: A threat assessment generates a list of probable security risks and threats to the organisation. Using this information, the company can create a remediation plan that will allow it to eliminate or minimise some of these risks, lowering the organisation’s total risk exposure.
Threat Modeling Best Practices
Threat modelling can be a useful technique when applied correctly. Some of the best practices include the following:
- Define the Scope: Running a threat modelling exercise across an organisation’s whole IT infrastructure might be intimidating. It is preferable to define a limited scope for an exercise, such as an application or system.
- Take Advantage of Visualization: Because humans are frequently visual thinkers, relationships may be easier to understand as a diagram rather than a list of facts. Network visualisation, attack trees, and other techniques can aid in the identification of potential threats or dangers.
- Use modelling frameworks: Undirected threat modelling exercises are more likely to miss potential risks or threats to the firm. A threat modelling framework can provide more extensive visibility by allowing you to ask focused inquiries.
- Try Attacker Profiling: An organisation may suffer attacks from various potential threat actors (either internal or external). Profile possible attackers based on their motivations, means, and so on in order to determine the various risks and hazards they may offer to an organisation.
- Create a Traceability Matrix: A traceability matrix can help uncover weak or missing security safeguards. Building one during a threat modelling exercise can aid in the detection of security weaknesses.
- Prioritise identified risks: Companies rarely have enough resources to address all of the risks and dangers they face. Prioritising based on likelihood and potential impact increases the potential return on investment (ROI).
Conclusion Threat modelling can give considerable benefits to an organisation by providing helpful information about the company’s risk exposure. However, successful threat modelling necessitates a thorough grasp of the various risks and threats that an organisation may face. You can check out our online training for cyber security to learn more about Threat Modeling.
