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 you get 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 types 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
It’s way easier than you think. Start with owning a house. You want to protect that house. Break down why you want to protect it - family, stuff, utility. What possible threats - fire storm, flood, burglar. Weight each risk on the Probability of it occuring and Impact if that risk does occur. (P&I) using a grid of low/med/high for each. Burglary, depending on your neighbourhood, is say low probability, low impact, i.e. shit gets stolen. Hurricane (tornado) is low probability but high impact (total loss).
Then you can decide how much budget you have to deal with this shit. Then list for every P&I risk factor a selection of mittigations. Better locks, screw and tie down roof, window security film etc. Then the last step is to trickle down your budget on the highest P&I risks so your limited money goes where it counts.
This simple model works on just about anything. The work is in imagination of possibilities and the due dilligence of mittigations. Crowdsourcing with others works. I usually do something like this starting with some focused whiteboarding sessions with stakeholders, then depending on budget and importance, move onto specific areas even up to making RFI and MOU and contracts with vendors.
The beauty is that when this is well done and disaster strikes, you can pull it up and have a preapproved action plan for dealing with the consequences of your disaster.
Easy to replace “house” with “privacy”.