Threat

Updated 05 Sep 2026

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What it is
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  a vulnerability that could be acted upon, whether by a threat actor (manmade) or by natural causes
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  In computer security, an event that could undermine your efforts to stay private and secure — for example, an adversary reading your communications in transit, or deleting/corrupting your data.
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Why it matters
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  "Threat" and "risk" get used interchangeably in everyday speech, but conflating them leads to bad security decisions. A threat is the possible event itself; separating it from the likelihood of that event (risk) is what lets you triage sensibly instead of treating every conceivable bad thing as equally worth defending against.
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Distinguish from
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  a Vulnerability is the underlying weakness itself, before it is acted upon
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  a Risk is a threat measured by impact and probability
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Related
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  Vulnerability
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  Risk
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  Threat Modeling
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  Adversary

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