When it comes to privacy, one of the first things people mention is threat modeling. However, searching up how to do threat modelling shows me results targeted at people with some technical knowledge.
I am unfortunately not one of those people. So I’m left wondering how a non-technical person can come to develop a threat model. Is this even possible? If not, how much would I need to dedicate to develop the technical skills needed to create one? Which ones would be beneficial to focus on? And, since I imagine one can develop those skills indefinitely, what are the different stages one might expect to reach and what would be important to reach each one?
Maybe I’m asking for a deeper guide than can be answered on Lemmy. If so, I hope it’ll at least inspire someone to write that guide.
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I can’t write a whole lot right now but your question is probably a bit too broad. Threat model needs to include the scope of what you’re protecting. For example, if you have some expensive heirloom watch, you might analyze how the threat changes if you’re home or wearing it out. Maybe lock your doors to your house is the first step. Second is keep it in a safe. Third is keep it in a larger safe bolted to the ground in a hidden area and make sure it can survive a fire and flood. Fourth might be buying an insurance policy in case something does happen. The model is continually evaluating risks vs mitigations to those risks.
From a digital perspective, you might consider how youget access to websites across the internet. Your email is a huge single point of failure. What if you lose access to your email? Because you forgot your password, or you were social engineered to click a bad link, or you shared the same password with another website that was compromised. Part of the challenge is having experienced or learned all the rypes of risks. And then the second half is understanding the mitigation options. For email, using a unique password and enabling 2-factor authentication (that is not SMS) mitigates a lot of possible threats, but not all.
You can learn quite a bit by just being familiar with types of scams and reading stories.
Cheers
Informally, I phrase it like:
- WHAT do you want to protect? (e.g. money, personal info, business data, specific items/resources, etc.)
- WHO do you need to protect it from? (e.g. online scammers/criminals, business competitors, an enemy government, etc.)
Consultants come up with more formal approaches for their corporate clients, but the above is usually enough for your average person. Then they can start reading the technical information looking for answers to the questions: “HOW might the threat actors get to my assets?” and “HOW can I protect those assets?”
Threat modeling is simply knowing where potential threats to yourself comes from, and planning accordingly. Most of us have some sort of risk of surveillance capitalism. Companies tracking you across sites, Ai scanning your email and photos, that sort of thing. As creepy as that is, if someone is targeting you specifically as a stalker or trying to break into your accounts, or physically into your home, that will be more important to model for. The things you to to. mitigate one thing may not be the same as something else. Sometimes they can be almost opposite actions, though there are certainly best practices to have in general.
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