When we speak of pasta, we typically mean the wheat-based food that the Italians have successfully transformed into a popular dish across the globe. But there’s a new pasta that’s in the market that’s called PASTA threat modeling. This pasta is a risk-focused threat modelling method that takes into account your complete technological and business environment in order to establish the most important areas for risk reduction.
Here we take a short review of how PASTA threat modeling works and how it could help your business.
What exactly is PASTA threat modeling?
Threat modeling is a procedure that analyzes, identifies and reduces potential risks to your company. Threat modelling is an proactive method to evaluate the threat your company is facing by providing insight and assessments of mitigation and risks.
PASTA can be described as an acronym for the Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis. PASTA threat modeling integrates the perspective of an attacker for the business along alongside risk and impact analysis to give a full view of threats to the products and applications as well as the vulnerability of these products and applications to attacks and aiding in making decisions regarding the risk and priority of fixing.
PASTA threat modeling is a seven-stage system for assessing your total security posture. Each stage builds upon the work done in the previous stage until stage seven is presented with a prioritized list of actions to correct your cybersecurity weaknesses. Each of the seven phases is outlined below.
Seven stages in PASTA threat modeling
1. Establish your business’s goals
Concentrate on the things that are important for your company. Know the goals of each product or application. The goals may be driven by internal processes or determined by clients, external partners as well as regulatory systems. These could include the requirement for a durable product that operates effectively and consistently, or protecting customers and assets or avoiding risks to reputation.
Stage 2 2. Define the technical nature of components and assets
Know the threat surface and sketch out what you are defending. For each component of your business, determine the way they are set up as well as the dependencies they share on other internal applications or on the places where third party software are being used. As thorough as you can to identify which can compromise the application, allowing the possibility of a threat to be realized.
Stage 3 Step 3: Application factoring, and identify the controls for applications
The relationships between the components. Find out who is using what roles and roles for assets such as hardware, data and software. Know the implicit trust models that exist that could be vulnerable to attack and also the application controls to protect high-risk internet transactions that may become the targets of attack.
Stage 4 Analyzing threats using threat intelligence
Find credible threats to your products and industry, and create your own threat library. Utilize intelligence to comprehend the most recent threats that affect your products or industry, and analyze application logs to learn about what that the system is recording and the threats that current security measures have thwarted.
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Stage 5: Detection of vulnerability
Determine which weaknesses could be broken when faced with threat. This stage builds upon stage 2 that identified the attack area, and looks for weaknesses or design flaws as well as weaknesses in the system’s codebase, configuration or architecture.
Stage 6: Analyze and model attacks
This is the stage of attack. The objective is to mimic the attacks that be exploited to exploit weaknesses or weaknesses, and to prove that the alleged risks to the application are actually threats. The PASTA threat modelling method recommends creating attack trees that maps threats, attacks and weaknesses, in order to build an outline of how the application could be hacked. At the end of this process, you’ll have the possibility of attacking ways to exploit vulnerabilities, which includes attack vectors.
Stage 7: Risk/impact analysis and the development of countermeasures
This stage is based on the questions in earlier phases, including the importance of the company (stage 1) What are we doing together with (stage 2) and how they all function together (stage 3) and what do my threat intelligence inform me about our risk (stage 4) in order to develop countermeasures
that are actually relevant to your company that are relevant to your product, business, and real threats that you are facing.
The advantages of PASTA threat modeling
There are many advantages when you take a comprehensive view of a company’s cybersecurity capabilities. A few of the advantages of PASTA threat modeling are:
Security should be at the heart of all business. PASTA threat modeling is an opportunity for all people from all levels of the organization to discover how their priorities are affected by cybersecurity threats and how their priorities impact the security decisions that an organisation decides to make.
Find out all the risks an organization could be facing. This includes the risk of these threats becoming threats and the objectives that threats can affect. Security teams can identify threats that need to be mitigated the risk, and ensure that attention and resources are efficiently distributed.
Understanding of the ever-changing cyber-security landscape. PASTA threat modelling isn’t an in-depth, static assessment that is only performed once. The procedure (at stage four) is an understanding of actual threats that your organization might be facing. Cybersecurity threats are constantly changing and PASTA threat modelling helps you to spend time knowing about these threats instead of using outdated information or even intelligence.
Informed decision making. PASTA threat modeling for new products allows your business to assess whether your existing protections are suitable for your new tool. It can also help you make the decision on whether to use an entirely new product or tool from a manufacturer.
Integrating PASTA threat modeling into your security plan
The main purpose of PASTA threat modeling is to provide your company with some suggestions on the best priorities for addressing weaknesses in a manner that best meets your security and business requirements.
PASTA threat modelling doesn’t exist in isolation. A lot of your current security efforts are based on application security checks that help you to identify the weaknesses of your software (which can be incorporated into the stages five and six in PASTA) as well as the tasks you put into ensure that you are in compliance with the regulatory requirements, will be a source of information for your threat modelling.
What PASTA threat modelling can do is to bring all your cybersecurity into an offensive perspective to ensure the highest level of cybersecurity planning for your company. It’s a lot like the way a pasta dish made with a robust sauce can make for dinner.