What is threat modeling?

The purpose of threat modeling is to proactively uncover and address potential security risks before attackers can exploit them. By thinking like an attacker and applying a structured approach, organizations can design stronger defenses, reduce costs, and prioritize the most critical risks.

Let's break down key benefits:

• It enables proactive vulnerability discovery, helping teams find weaknesses early in development.
• It provides risk assessment, clarifying which assets are most valuable, which threats matter most, and where the greatest impact may occur.
• It supports secure design, ensuring security is built into systems from the start rather than added later.
• It drives effective resource allocation, focusing testing and remediation efforts on the most important vulnerabilities.
• By catching issues early, it reduces the need for expensive fixes and rework, lowering overall costs.
• Threat modeling also improves communication by giving analysts, developers, and stakeholders a shared view of risks.

Ultimately, it strengthens an organization's overall security posture, making it better prepared to defend against evolving cyberattacks.

Threat modeling works by following a structured process to identify what needs protection, who might attack it, how they might do it, and what defenses should be in place. The idea is to anticipate risks early so they can be designed out of the system rather than patched later.

The process usually includes four main steps:

1. Identify assets – Define what needs to be protected (data, systems, users).
2. Decompose the system – Map out architecture, data flows, and trust boundaries.
3. Identify threats – Think like an attacker to uncover possible vulnerabilities and attack vectors.
4. Prioritize and mitigate – Assess the risks, rank them by impact and likelihood, and design security controls to address the most critical ones.

To guide this process, several popular methodologies are widely used:

• STRIDE (Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, Elevation of Privilege): Developed by Microsoft, it categorizes threats by type.
• PASTA (Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis): A risk-centric method that models attacks step by step.
• OCTAVE (Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation): Focuses on organizational risk and security practices.
• DREAD (Damage, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected Users, Discoverability): a scoring model to quantify risk.
• Attack trees: A visual method that maps out possible attack paths and how they might unfold.

By using these structured approaches, organizations can systematically uncover threats and ensure that security controls are prioritized where they matter most.

Implementing threat modeling in network security means systematically analyzing your infrastructure to uncover weak points, anticipate attacks, and design effective defenses. The process is usually broken into five key steps:

1. Define security objectives
   Start by clarifying what you want to protect and why. Objectives might include protecting sensitive customer data, ensuring service availability, or preventing unauthorized access to internal systems. Clear goals set the scope for the modeling effort.
2. Create an architecture overview
   Map out your network architecture: devices, servers, data flows, protocols, authentication points, and trust boundaries (where data crosses from one security zone to another). This provides a complete picture of how information moves through the system.
3. Decompose the system
   Break the network into components such as firewalls, routers, VPNs, endpoints, and cloud services. Document how each part interacts, including entry points an attacker could exploit. This helps uncover potential vulnerabilities in connections and configurations.
4. Identify and prioritize threats
   Use threat modeling methodologies (like STRIDE, attack trees, or PASTA) to systematically identify possible threats: spoofing, data tampering, DoS attacks, or privilege escalation. Assess each threat by impact and likelihood, then prioritize the most critical risks.
5. Define and apply mitigations
   For each prioritized threat, design or strengthen security controls. This could mean enforcing stronger authentication, segmenting networks, applying intrusion detection systems, or tightening firewall rules. Record mitigation strategies in documentation so they can be tested and audited.

Threat modeling is applied across industries and technologies to identify and mitigate security risks before they can be exploited. Some common examples include:

• Banking – Threat modeling helps secure digital banking features, including cryptocurrency operations, user authentication, and transaction workflows.
• Generative AI workloads – As AI systems process sensitive data and generate outputs, threat modeling is used to assess risks like data leakage, prompt injection, and model manipulation.
• IoT and smart home systems – Threat modeling identifies risks to privacy and safety from connected devices, whether through weak authentication, network attacks, or physical tampering.
• Connected cars applications – in this case, the threat modeling is applied to secure communication channels, onboard systems, and over-the-air updates against malicious access.
• Medical devices – Specialized threat models safeguard sensitive patient data and ensure that life-critical devices are resilient against both cyber and physical attacks.