Summary

By being aware of the typical approach used by attackers as well as their goals, you can be more effective when applying countermeasures. It also helps to use a goal-based approach when considering and identifying threats, and to use the STRIDE model to categorize threats based on the goals of the attacker, for example, to spoof identity, tamper with data, deny service, elevate privileges, and so on. This allows you to focus more on the general approaches that should be used for risk mitigation, rather than focusing on the identification of every possible attack, which can be a time-consuming and potentially fruitless exercise.

This chapter has shown you the top threats that have the potential to compromise your network, host infrastructure, and applications. Knowledge of these threats, together with the appropriate countermeasures, provides essential information for the threat modeling process It enables you to identify the threats that are specific to your particular scenario and prioritize them based on the degree of risk they pose to your system. This structured process for identifying and prioritizing threats is referred to as threat modeling . For more information, see Chapter 3, "Threat Modeling."