Etsy's Threat Modeling
Gabrielle Gianelli has pulled back the curtain on how Etsy threat modeled a new marketing campaign. (“Threat Modeling for Marketing Campaigns.”)
I’m really happy to see this post, and the approach that they’ve taken:
First, we wanted to make our program sustainable through proactive defenses. When we designed the program we tried to bake in rules to make the program less attractive to attackers. However, we didn’t want these rules to introduce roadblocks in the product that made the program less valuable from users’ perspectives, or financially unsustainable from a business perspective.
Gabrielle apologizes several times for not giving more specifics, eg:
I have to admit upfront, I’m being a little ambiguous about what we’ve actually implemented, but I believe it doesn’t really matter since each situation will differ in the particulars.
I think this is almost exactly right. I could probably tell you about the specifics of the inputs into the machine learning algorithms they’re probably using. Not because I’m under NDA to Etsy (I’m not), but because such specifics have a great deal of commonality. More importantly, and here’s where I differ, I believe you don’t want to know those specifics. Those specifics would be very likely to distract you from going from a model (Etsy’s is a good one) to the specifics of your situation. So I would encourage Etsy to keep blogging like this, and to realize they’re at a great level of abstraction.
So go read Threat Modeling for Marketing Campaigns