With the increasing number of hacking incidents, cybersecurity was and still is a major concern in today’s cyber landscape. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime will cost the world over 10 trillion dollars yearly by 2025. This rose from three trillion ten years ago and six trillion in 2021.

Hence, it is no wonder companies have to spend more to counter this threat. They do this by deploying a series of defenses and countermeasures which cost more as the days go by. All this is done in a bid to keep sensitive and confidential information safe and secure. But the attacks keep increasing, no matter what.

The above statistics show that as more money is being pumped into the cybersecurity sector, which is predicted to hit 300 billion dollars by 2026, cybercriminals are still the victors. So what exactly can be done to reduce your cybersecurity risk?

To get to the heart of this issue, we need to take up threat modeling. This is not new software that will eliminate the problem in one fell swoop. Instead, it is an approach that talks about seeing the problem from a cyber criminal’s perspective.

 

What is Threat Modeling?

Threat modeling is a common technique in application development and seems to be a good fit for cybersecurity. It can be compared to the process of risk analysis in the insurance world. It refers to the process of optimizing app, business, or system process security by pinpointing aims and spelling out weaknesses, after which you create countermeasures to reduce or lessen the effects of threats to the process or system as a whole.

Threat modeling helps businesses identify the security needs of a process or system, as long as it is operation-critical, processing confidential, or made up of valued data. It is a structured and systematic procedure aiming to pinpoint weaknesses and threats to lessen cybersecurity risk to company resources. It also helps IT administrators understand the effect of threats, measure the likely severity, and implement the best controls.

Implementing a threat modeling procedure is bound to have a significant impact across the departments of a business. Chief technology officers, IT managers, and other cybersecurity professionals should join forces to ensure that the procedure works as best as it can. This will provide a platform to combat the growing cybersecurity risk successfully.

 

What You Need to Be Sure of When Conducting a Threat Modeling Procedure

Below are some questions to get answers to while conducting a threat modeling procedure:

– What will hackers target?

– What can go wrong?

– What are we doing about it?

– Are we doing a good enough job?

 

Ways Threat Modeling Reduces Cybersecurity Risk

Below are some ways threat modeling reduces cybersecurity risk:

STRIDE

STRIDE was adopted by tech giant Microsoft back in 2002 after it was launched by the same company in 1999. This method is currently the most effective threat modeling method to date. It has evolved over the years as it now entails threat-specific tables and some variants.

STRIDE evaluates the detail design of the system in question and models the system in place. STRIDE is used to pinpoint system entities, events, and the system’s limits by creating data-flow diagrams. The term STRIDE is a mnemonic, and it stands for:

Spoofing identity

Users pretending to be someone else.

Tampering with data

Altering information or data on disk or network.

Repudiation

Claiming ignorance for an event. This can be positive or negative.

Information disclosure

Offering information to unauthorized staff.

Denial of service

Using and exhausting services meant for others.

Elevation of Privilege

Giving permission controls to an unauthorized user.

STRIDE has been used for cyber-only and cyber-physical systems with great success. However, Microsoft no longer uses this method.

Trike

This method focuses on using a threat model as a tool for risk management and was initially created as a security audit framework. Based on requirement models, threat models create the stakeholder-defined acceptable risk level for each class. The analysis of the requirements model will always result in a threat model where threats are identified and assigned risk values. This is then used to develop a risk model using assets, calculated risk exposure, actions, and roles.

DREAD

DREAD stands for Damage potential, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected users, and Discoverability. It is a quantitative risk analysis that values, compares, and ranks a cyber threat’s severity in these five categories. Microsoft adopted this method but later disengaged it due to its supposed inconsistency. Many businesses and companies currently use it, however. Here are the ways DREAD quantifies cyber threats:

Damage Potential

Ranks the extent of the damage arising from the vulnerability.  

Reproducibility

Value the possibility and ease of reproducing the attack.  

Exploitability

Attaches a rating (in figures) to the effort that will launch the attack.  

Affected Users

Measures the number of users that will be affected if the attack happens again.

Discoverability

Measures the ease it takes to uncover the threat.

PASTA

This acronym stands for Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis. It is a risk-centric, seven-step framework that offers a dynamic approach to risk identification and management. Users develop a comprehensive analysis of recognized threats, and developers then create an asset-centric mitigation tactic by evaluating the app through the lens of an attacker. Below are the seven steps of PASTA:

– Define Objectives

– Define Scope

– Application Decomposition

– Threat Analysis

– Vulnerability Analysis

– Attack Modeling

– Risk and Impact Analysis

 

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