Why Threat Modeling Matters
Finding risks before attackers do.
What Threat Modeling Is
Threat modeling is the structured practice of identifying what can go wrong in a system before attackers find out for you. You analyze a design, enumerate possible threats, and decide how to mitigate them.
It answers four core questions:
- What are we building?
- What can go wrong?
- What are we going to do about it?
- Did we do a good job?
Shift Left on Security
Threat modeling embodies the principle of shifting left: addressing security early in the development lifecycle rather than after deployment.
The cost of fixing a flaw grows dramatically the later it is found:
- Design phase — change a diagram, nearly free
- Development — rewrite some code
- Production — emergency patch, incident, possible breach
Finding a design flaw before a single line of code is written is the cheapest fix available.
All lessons in this course
- Why Threat Modeling Matters
- The STRIDE Framework
- Data Flow Diagrams and Trust Boundaries
- Attack Trees and Prioritizing Risk