Cybersecurity is a critical concern for organizations across all industries, and threat modeling tools are a vital component for creating and maintaining a secure environment for growing organizational data.
Data breaches and hacks have impacted a growing number of enterprise companies in recent years, costing them hundreds of millions in direct costs, and damaging business reputations in ways that are difficult to measure.
For example, the Equifax data breach that exposed the personal data of 147 million customers, ended up costing the company between $439 and $600 million to resolve. The Yahoo data breach, the largest so far, cost the company an estimated $350 million in direct costs – but that number does not include the $35 million in fines from the SEC or the $50 million in damages to settle civil suits related to the breach; nor does it include any estimated costs of loss of customers, business disruption, or reputational damage.
Once a threat modeling tool is in place, potential threats will be identified along with mitigation procedures. There are a variety of cybersecurity tools that a company can engage to protect its critical data. Here are a few common tools:
1. Anti-Malware Tools
Anti-malware tools help companies identify, block, and remove malware. These functions are important in protecting the system from malware intrusion, but they don’t address system vulnerabilities or non-malware threats.
2. Intrusion Detection and Prevention Tools
Intrusion detection and prevention tools monitor system files and configurations to discover malicious code, such as malware or spyware. Most also monitor user behavior for malicious intent or anomalies that may indicate a problem. While these provide more comprehensive protection from outside threats than anti-malware alone, they lack the network scanning and testing properties that are fundamental to threat modeling tools.
3. Authentication and Authorization Tools
Authentication and authorization tools validate the identity of a user attempting to access data and then determine whether or not the user is permitted to perform specific actions involving that resource. While authentication and authorization tools are vital to ensuring that data is secured from both irresponsible and malicious misuse, they do not actively and continuously address enterprise security of the system as a whole.
4. Threat Modeling Tools
Threat modeling tools offer a different level of cyber preparedness and security monitoring for organizations of all sizes. A threat modeling tool begins the security review process at the design stage using a proactive, threat-based approach and continues it through deployment and operation.
Threat modeling, the process of identifying and remediating system vulnerabilities, is an essential component of a comprehensive cybersecurity practice. Threat modeling tools allow companies to identify potential weaknesses across their attack surface, both before and after new components are deployed, ensure networks and systems are secured, and alert users of new threats as they arise.
Threat modeling tools can provide a company with a manageable, comprehensive cybersecurity process with advantages such as:
- Automation – the basic, repetitive parts of the process can be automated to reduce the administrative burden on the internal technology team.
- Scalability – the capability of the threat modeling tools grow along with the business. As the networks become more complex, threat modeling tools have the built-in capacity to manage the introduction of additional users, processes, software, and hardware.
- Pre-loaded Content and Regular Updates – A threat modeling tool may include known threats and vulnerabilities at installation, providing an initial assessment of system security. Regular updates keep your company informed about new threats and potential vulnerabilities, as well as plans for remediating any issues that may arise.
While there are some free threat modeling tools on the market, they tend to provide minimal services, failing in the fundamental promise of threat modeling – an all-inclusive, complete, updated and maintained security process.
Rather than being considered as a cost to the organization, a threat modeling tool should instead be looked at as a long-term investment in cybersecurity. The potential return on investment is enormous: as cyber attacks become more sophisticated, and prevalent, and costly to companies, preventing them becomes increasingly critical as well.
As a business grows and its systems grow in complexity, implementing and maintaining a threat modeling process becomes more of a challenge. A scalable, automatically updated threat modeling tool is an intelligent investment in the present and future cybersecurity of the organization, preventing a data breach that could be costly in dollars, reputation, and future business.
About ThreatModeler
ThreatModeler is an automated threat modeling tool that strengthens an enterprise’s SDLC by identifying, predicting and defining threats across all applications and devices in the operational IT stack. This automated platform works with all types of computing environments.
To learn more about how ThreatModeler™ can help your organization build a scalable threat modeling process, book a demo to speak to a ThreatModeler expert today.