How can you prioritize critical risks identified during a threat modeling exercise?

1 Understand your context

Before you can prioritize your risks, you need to understand your context. This means defining your scope, objectives, assumptions, and constraints for your threat modeling exercise. You also need to identify your assets, data flows, trust boundaries, and attack surfaces. These are the elements that you want to protect and that could be exploited by attackers. By understanding your context, you can align your risk assessment with your business goals and security requirements.

2 Use a risk matrix

A risk matrix is a simple tool that helps you visualize and compare your risks based on two dimensions: likelihood and impact. Likelihood is the probability of a threat occurring, and impact is the severity of the consequences if it does. You can use different scales and criteria to measure these dimensions, such as qualitative (low, medium, high) or quantitative (numeric, monetary, time-based). By plotting your risks on a risk matrix, you can easily see which ones are high-priority (high likelihood and high impact), medium-priority (high likelihood or high impact), or low-priority (low likelihood and low impact).

3 Apply a scoring system

A scoring system is a more refined way of prioritizing your risks based on multiple factors and weights. You can use a scoring system to assign numerical values to your risks based on various criteria, such as threat sources, attack vectors, vulnerabilities, controls, and mitigations. You can also assign different weights to each criterion based on their relative importance. By adding up the scores and weights, you can rank your risks from highest to lowest priority.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?