Threat Modeling
A structured approach to identifying potential threats to a system, understanding attack surfaces, and determining which threats warrant mitigation. Threat modeling shifts security thinking from reactive to proactive.
Why it matters
Risk assessment tells you what could go wrong at an organizational level. Threat modeling tells you how an attacker could make it happen at a system level. Without threat modeling, security controls are applied uniformly rather than proportionally, which means critical attack paths may be under-protected while low-risk areas are over-engineered. Threat modeling is especially valuable during system design, where fixing vulnerabilities costs a fraction of what it costs after deployment.
In practice
Threat modeling frameworks like STRIDE, PASTA, or attack trees help teams systematically enumerate threats against system components. The output is a prioritized list of threats with proposed mitigations. These feed directly into risk assessments and control selection. In vucavoid, threats identified through modeling can be captured as risks, linked to the affected assets and systems, and tracked through the standard treatment workflow with controls mapped to each identified threat.