Category:Threat Agent

This category is for tagging articles related to common application security threat agents.

What is a Threat Agent?
The term Threat Agent is used to indicate an individual or group that can manifest a threat. It is fundamental to identify who would want to exploit the assets of a company, and how they might use them against the company.

Threat Agent = Capabilities + Intentions + Past Activities

These individuals and groups can be classified as follows:
 * Non-Target Specific: Non-Target Specific Threat Agents are computer viruses, worms, trojans and logic bombs.
 * Employees: Staff, contractors, operational/maintenance personnel, or security guards who are annoyed with the company.
 * Organized Crime and Criminals: Criminals target information that is of value to them, such as bank accounts, credit cards or intellectual property that can be converted into money. Criminals will often make use of insiders to help them.
 * Corporations: Corporations who are engaged in offensive information warfare or competitive intelligence. Partners and competitors come under this category.
 * Human, Unintentional: Accidents, carelessness.
 * Human, Intentional: Insider, outsider.
 * Natural: Flood, fire, lightning, meteor, earthquakes.

Threat Risk Modeling is an activity to understand the security in an application. The specific vulnerability, related countermeasures, and impact are not required to discuss a threat, because the threat exists even if the target is well protected against it. For example, there is a threat that an attacker could launch a denial of service attack against your application even if you have sufficient defenses in place.

All attack articles should follow the Threat Agent template.