Threat

Threat is a term used in risk management to indicate the source of some negative event, force, person or activity that wants or can damage any value (asset). Sometimes the concept of danger is used. The threat has adverse effect on safety or could cause damage, loss, adverse change, or any other undesirable phenomenon.

Threat can be natural disasters (e.g. flood, fire, calamity, etc.), accidents (e.g. car accident, water contamination, explosion, radiation etc.), social behavior (e.g. war, crime, etc.), the economic behavior of the financial market (e.g. financial crisis, the movement of the exchange rate, the unavailability of credit, etc.) or behavior of individuals (e.g. operator error, theft, unauthorized use, abuse of power, etc.).

Threat exploits vulnerability and causes risks (damages). These are called threat impacts and can be quantified as a loss (costs of restoration of assets or costs to eliminate the consequences of damage).

Threat level is the basic characteristics of the threat, i.e. the dangerousness of threat, threat ability to cause damage.

The threat is an external factor that exists independently of the will of the organization or person who acts directly on the assets.

Use of the threat in practice: Organizations must know threats of their activity or business. It is therefore performed a threat analysis in order to allow the implementation of effective countermeasures to reduce or eliminate them. External threats of the organization can be divided according to factors of PESTLE Analysis. Internal threats are financial, personnel, information, operations, process or project. Threat analysis is, for example, par of the highly used SWOT Analysis.