Why Your Business Should Take a Holistic Approach to Threat Modeling?

Threat modeling is basically a systematic method for identifying, prioritizing, and mitigating cybersecurity threats.

President of Shostack and Associates, Adam Shostack defines threat modeling as, “Threat modeling gives you the way of seeing the forest, and a frame for communicating about the work that you (and your team) are doing and why you’re doing it.

It involves developing a shared understanding of product or service architecture and problems that could occur.” 

It requires businesses to promote collaborative thinking. To get better visibility into cybersecurity strategy, it is important to take a holistic approach to threat modeling. With a comprehensive approach to threat, modeling businesses can also boost their efficiency.

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In this article, you will learn about the benefits of taking a holistic approach to threat modeling.

Advantages of Threat Modeling

Here are some of the advantages of threat modeling that your business should know about.

1. Increasing Awareness

One of the biggest advantages of taking a holistic approach to threat modeling is that it educates all the stakeholders involved. More importantly, it opens doors for collaboration between security teams, developers of Avast Vpn, and operations departments, all striving towards a common goal, which is to prevent cybersecurity attacks.

When all the stakeholders are on the same page, it reduces the security vulnerability of businesses and makes them more secure.

The more aware your employees are, the harder it is for hackers to trick them into sharing their personal information. Cyber-aware employees are an asset because they can raise the red flag as soon as they identify suspicious activity.

For instance, if they see an attack targeting HOSTNOC dedicated server, they will immediately report it to the IT department, who can act quickly to minimize the damage.

2. Cost Estimation

As mentioned before, threat modeling can not only help you in prioritizing threats, but it can also help you in estimating the cost of each threat. Moreover, it also tells you what kind of protection you need against those threats. You can also unearth useful insights and data which can come in handy when conducting cost-benefit analysis when creating a budget. 

3. Facilitate Communication

Every business leader learns from others especially when it comes to discussing the specifics and problems of threat modeling. Despite reaching the top of the food chain in their respective domains, they gain valuable experience when preparing documents for communicating security practices throughout the organizations.

Threat modeling is all about producing action plans and creating educational materials which serve as a standard for an organization. 

4. Transforming Business Operations

Cybersecurity is evolving rapidly so does the threat landscape. Ransomware was one of the most common types of cyberattacks targeting businesses a couple of years back but today it is not as prevalent as it once was. Instead, it has evolved and become more sophisticated and is now being used to target critical infrastructure instead of business assets.

It is important for businesses to adapt to this change and tweak their cybersecurity strategy accordingly. That is where threat modeling can come in handy. A threat modeling system can produce documents that should be constantly updated. This can also have an impact on your business operations and might transform the way your business operates.

5. New Applications and Use Cases

Threat modeling can act as a bridge that connects development with security. This means that leaders, whether they belong to app development, security or operations come together to solve common problems.

This leads to innovation, the creation of new applications, and the emergence of new use cases. In addition to this, it also facilitates the development of apps with security features built-in.

That is not all, threat modeling can also help businesses choose the right tools, products, services, and platforms. This goes a long way in breeding a security culture in your organization and making your business more secure.

Types of Threat Modeling Approaches

There are many different types of threat modeling methods. Some of them are as follows:

1. STRIDE (Spoofing identify, Tempering with data, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of service, Elevation of privilege)
2. PASTA (Process of Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis)
3. LINDDUN (Linkability, Identifiability, Nonrepudiation, Detectability, Disclosure of information, Unawareness, Noncompliance)
4. CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System)
5. hTMM (Hybrid Threat Modeling Method)

How to Adopt a Holistic Approach to Threat Modeling?

Now, you know the benefits of taking the holistic approach and different types of threat modeling approaches, let us look at how you can adopt a holistic approach to threat modeling.

1. Involve technology, business, and operational leaders in the threat modeling process to get diversified input and create a comprehensive threat modeling strategy that can help you overcome security challenges faced by your organization.
2. Establish a two-way communication channel. Uninterrupted communication helps your employees make the right security decisions. That does not stop there. These employees can also direct your future threat modeling actions by giving their inputs.
3. Analyze threat modeling priorities and set clear objectives accordingly. This makes it easy for you to communicate these objectives to all the stakeholders such as service providers, consultants, suppliers, partners, and employees. This will give them a direction and make it easy for them to achieve their cybersecurity goal.

Conclusion

It is high time businesses adopt threat modeling and do it by adopting a holistic approach. Not only does it deliver amazing benefits such as increasing awareness, cost estimation, transform business operations and pave the way for new applications and use cases.

There are different types of threat modeling methods you can adopt, and each has their advantages and disadvantages. That is why it is better to take the holistic approach to threat modeling instead of relying heavily on a single threat modeling method which might have its shortcomings.

Engage leaders from security, business, and operations departments to collectively solve the organization’s security problems. This will help you to get a diversified point of view and feedback from different sources.

Make communication a priority to assist employees in making the right decisions when it comes to security. Focus on the threat modeling priorities when setting objectives.

Once the objectives are set according to the threat modeling priorities, it becomes relatively easy to achieve that goal. How do you create a comprehensive strategy for threat modeling? Let us know in the comment section below.