People may include employees and customers along with other invited persons such as contractors or guests. Property assets consist of both tangible and intangible items that can be assigned a value.
Intangible assets include reputation and proprietary information. Information may include databases, software code, critical company records, and many other intangible items. Threat — Anything that can exploit a vulnerability, intentionally or accidentally, and obtain, damage, or destroy an asset. To determine the likelihood or probability of an event, statistical evidence is normally required. This evidence can come from background history, statistical evidence, or personal experience. To determine the effect of a particular event, assessments can be made as to the financial costs or benefits that a particular event can cause.
When combined together the two aspects of likelihood and effect can be measured mathematically, or qualitatively as likely, highly likely or remote etc. As can be seen, an accurate threat assessment relies on a detailed knowledge and understanding of the threat actor, their intentions and capabilities.
Comparing the two assessments of Risk and Threat, it can be seen that a Risk Assessment focuses on the potential events that may occur and the effect those events could have.
Once an event is identified it is relatively easy to calculate through statistical analysis the likelihood of that event occurring.
Measuring the effect of an identified event is also generally calculable and based on effects costing. Threat, vulnerability and risk are terms that are commonly mixed up. However, their understanding is crucial for building effective cybersecurity policies and keeping your company safe from various cyber attacks. A threat is any type of danger, which can damage or steal data, create a disruption or cause a harm in general.
Common examples of threats include malware, phishing, data breaches and even rogue employees. Threats are manifested by threat actors, who are either individuals or groups with various backgrounds and motivations. Understanding threats is critical for building effective mitigations and helps to make the right decisions in cybersecurity.
The risk to an asset is calculated as the combination of threats and vulnerabilities. This means that in some situations, though threats may exist, if there are no vulnerabilities then there is little to no risk. Another important thing to consider is what happens when we inject into the mix the all too familiar term at least for security professionals of Mitigation —the action of reducing the severity, seriousness, or painfulness of something.
To mitigate a risk is to target the probability of a threat being realized, which is to say that you make it less likely to happen. To mitigate a threat, on the other hand, is to combat the active harm itself, which is the definition of reactive or counter-measures.
I hope this article clarified some of the terms that get tossed around out there. But keep in mind that the actual bottom line is the work itself, and the safety, security and wellbeing of everyone involved. Learn more about this subject—and many others—in my master class on Hostile Activity Prevention. Utilizing Israeli know-how and delivered by me, Ami Toben, this online course teaches actionable, time-tested methods of prevention, detection and disruption of hostile attacks.
While I agree that entirely too many security professionals do not understand the difference between the common vernacular, such as threat and risk, our opinions diverge at the definition of risk. The Bottom line up front is that you cannot determine risk with out the measurement of consequence Degree of impact, call it what you will.
Every project we work on, we start by identifying the Risk Profile for the client asset s and ask: What do I have to protect? What do I have to protect it from? And What do I have to protect it with? Consequence 2, Threat and 3, Vulnerability.
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