Any activity or event that has the potential to cause an unwanted outcome can be considered a threat. A threat is any action that may intentionally or unintentionally cause damage, disruption, or complete loss of assets.

The severity of a threat could be determined based on its impact. A threat can be intentional or accidental as well (due to human error). It can be induced by people, organizations, hardware, software, or nature. Some of the common threat events are as follows:

• A possibility of a virus outbreak
• A power surge or failure
• Fire
• Earthquake
• Floods
• Typo errors in critical financial transactions