Definition
An external threat includes:
- individuals outside an organization attempting to gain unauthorized access to an organization’s networks using the Internet, other networks, or dial-up modems.
- flooding a network with large volumes of access requests so that the network is unable to respond to legitimate requests, one type of denial-of-service attack.
External threats include: lone hackers, organized crime groups, and government entities, as well as environmental events such as weather and earthquakes.
External threats can be countered by implementing security controls on the perimeters of the network, such as firewalls, that limit user access and data interchange between systems and users within the organization's network and systems and users outside the network, especially on the Internet.