Threat Modeling: How Security Teams Think Like Attackers Before the Attack
Threat modeling is the practice of identifying and analyzing potential attacks before they happen. Here is a practical approach for security teams that want to build systems and defenses the way attackers will try to break them.
By Tom Brennan
Threat modeling is the discipline of thinking systematically about how an adversary might attack your systems before they do. Organizations that do it proactively — as a structured part of system design and security program planning — catch vulnerabilities earlier and remediate them more cheaply.
The Four Questions of Threat Modeling
- What are we building? — A clear understanding of the system, its components, data flows, trust boundaries, and dependencies.
- What can go wrong? — Systematic enumeration of threats using frameworks like STRIDE (Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, Elevation of Privilege) or MITRE ATT&CK.
- What are we going to do about it? — Mitigation strategies for each identified threat, prioritized by risk impact.
- Did we do a good enough job? — Validation through review, testing, and ongoing reassessment.
Threat Modeling at the Organizational Level
Proactive Risk applies threat modeling at the organizational level — mapping the adversary's path from initial access through lateral movement to their objectives. This produces a threat model that drives security investment prioritization and validates that controls interrupt adversary operations, not just appear on compliance checklists.
Free Threat Intelligence Resources
Research adversary techniques and build your threat models with Proactive Risk's curated toolkits, available free in the Downloads library:
- OSINT Browser Bookmarks — a curated collection of open-source intelligence tools, search engines, and investigation resources for threat research
- Proactive Risk GitHub Repositories — open-source security tools and scripts published by the Proactive Risk team