Fundamentals of Communications and Networking, 3rd Edition

Network Risks, Threats, and Vulnerabilities

A risk is the probability of something bad happening. From the perspective of a network, something bad could mean loss of availability, slow performance, unauthorized access, or a data breach.

A threat is something bad that can happen to a network, such as a denial of service (DoS) attack that can render the network or IP host unavailable, or a password brute-force attack for public-facing portals with login IDs and passwords. A man-in-the-middle attack is a threat in which unencrypted IP packets are captured and examined for sensitive data. Hence, a threat is something that is initiated by a hacker or perpetrator to cause damage.

A vulnerability is a weakness in the design. This can be a network ...