From the course: Ethical Hacking: Introduction to Ethical Hacking

Modeling threats

From the course: Ethical Hacking: Introduction to Ethical Hacking

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Modeling threats

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- [Instructor] One way to prevent an attack is to be able to see where the attack might occur. In this segment, we'll outline how threat modeling helps visualize vulnerabilities within entry points such as software, networks and users so they can be mitigated before resulting in an attack. Today there are multiple security threats that include malware, supply chain attacks, ransomware and cryptojacking. When evaluating threats, the security analysts perform several exercises. Let's talk about a few methods. A vulnerability analysis is analyzing potential weaknesses across multiple attack vectors. A threat assessment will determine the best approach to secure a system against a particular threat. And threat modeling looks at external attack vectors to understand how the attacks could be executed. Threat modeling methods are used to create a visualization of the entire system, along with potential entry points and the list of possible attacks. The idea is to gain a well-rounded view of potential threats with the goal of reducing overall risk. Let's walk through what would happen during a simple threat assessment. Now, in this scenario, a user opens an email attachment which might contain a threat such as malware. Without anything stopping the user, they can open and launch the application, which can lead to a cyber attack. Now, going through threat modeling, we can see how we can reduce that vulnerability by putting in place waste to manage those risks. For example, the user opens the email attachment. Now, in this case, instead of opening and showing the user the attachment, it goes through a file check process where we want to examine the attachment. If there's a dangerous extension, it goes into quarantine. However, if there's no threat, the user is then allowed to launch the application and view the attachment. To conduct threat modeling there are a number of different tools available. I'm here at this page where you can download Microsoft's Threat Modeling Tool, and I'll scroll down, and here's where you can select the link to download the tool. I download and open the tool. And here we can see an example where you can learn more about the threat modeling process. Well, why is this important? Well, today there are many threats. Let's look at the different cyber attacks over the years. I'm here at this website, World's Biggest Data Breaches & Hacks, where we can see the many significant data breaches with a massive amount of exposed data. And we can see that this was last updated in September, 2022. Now, I'll scroll down, but I wanted to show you something. We'll go back down to 2012 and there's a significant difference over the last 10 years. The number of breaches in the last 10 years has increased significantly because there are so many more attack vectors and that is why it's essential to take steps to reduce vulnerabilities. Now let's test your knowledge: outline how threat modeling helps visualize vulnerabilities within entry points so they can be mitigated before resulting in an attack. You can record your answer on the challenge worksheet.

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