Cybercrime has been very rampant nowadays. There is not much of a difference between a crime done in real life and these types of attacks.
The only difference is that they are utilized on the internet. Regardless, it all comes in different ways.
Fortunately, because of how advanced technology has become over the years, there are now multiple open resources to help mitigate and combat these types of attacks.
Law enforcement agencies around the world have definitely become more open and understanding regarding how vast and deep the scope of these attacks can be.
Private companies, security researchers, and initiative projects sometimes issue warnings if there is a looming threat, risk, or detected vulnerability so that people can immediately secure themselves.
Risk, threat, and vulnerability are the three most used computer terms that are most of the time confused by one another.
Getting the definition and understanding of these three might have the possibility of exposing yourself to danger. With that, here is the explanation on the difference between risk, threat, and vulnerability.
What Is a Threat?
Threat refers to the possibility of harm that can be caused by a plethora of malicious cyber attacks.
These harm could be identity theft, corruption of data, stealing, interruption in operations, disrupting systems, and many more. It has not happened just yet, but it has the possibility to cause you and your system great harm.
According to Trava Security, the threats could be divided into three compositions.
Internal Threats. These threats include the use of strategies like phishing, ransomware, and deploying malicious code in order for malicious threat actors to compromise a victim's system.
Unintentional Threats. Human error is frequently blamed for threats that were not intended to be carried out. Unintentional threats are usually caused by human error. As an example, an employee might have accidentally left an important data or resource exposed to the public unintentionally. Or this could be an employee forgetting to update necessary changes in their softwares.
Natural Threats: these are unpredictable but asset damaging threats which are typically not associated with cybersecurity. This could be a strong earthquake or a typhoon.
What Is a Vulnerability?
Vulnerabilities are flaws in your environment and assets that expose you to prospective threats and increased risk.
As reported by Kenna Security, a company or an organization can have a plethora of vulnerabilities in their systems. However, not all vulnerabilities detected in a system can pose harm or put an entity in grave danger.
Only a small number of those are likely to pose an actual risk to your firm, because many of those vulnerabilities may not be regularly exploited in your industry.
There might be thousands of vulnerabilities present, but not everything needs to be patched. As reported, only 2% to 5% of vulnerabilities are likely to be exploited. It is not possible to remediate all of them, most organizations can only patch one out of every 10 vulnerabilities.
When it comes to prioritizing what vulnerability to patch, this is where Security and IT teams provide measures, insights, and risk-based vulnerability prioritization.
What Is a Risk?
According to Trava, Assets, threats, and vulnerabilities all come together to form what is known as cyber risk. When a threat takes advantage of a vulnerability, there is a possibility that an asset will be lost, damaged, or destroyed.
This is known as the "exposure risk." To phrase it another way, risks are equal to threats plus vulnerabilities.
In order to evaluate the degree of cyber risk you pose to others, you need to be familiar with the many forms of attacks that can be launched and the weak spots in your own system.
Cybersecurity is an ever evolving field with new technological ways being discovered every now and then. There might be truth in the notion that risks cannot be reduced to zero, however, it can be controlled to a degree that is appropriate to the level of tolerance that your organization has for taking chances.
The end goal, which stays the same no matter how you choose to deal with it, is to keep your overall risk as low, manageable, and recognized as possible.
