Assessments are vital to system and application security for their ability to identify potential vulnerabilities and assess the effectiveness of existing security controls. Assessments allow organizations to proactively identify weaknesses before they can be exploited by attackers, helping to reduce the risk of a successful breach or compromise. Additionally, assessments provide visibility into new threats as they emerge, allowing organizations to update and strengthen their security measures accordingly. Finally, assessments help validate whether existing controls are sufficient in protecting against current threat vectors or if additional measures need to be taken. All of this information can help inform decisions on where best practices should be implemented, as well as provide valuable insight that can help ensure operational continuity in complex IT environments.
various contexts in which terrorism is applied: “crime, politics, war, propaganda and religion” (p. 197). Although the author presented five conceptual lenses for examining terrorism, which would contribute to a robust understanding of the concept. He, however, also noted the limitation of the framework, as not being all-encompassing. This suggests that the breath of application of the concept, opens it up to several interpretations and thus, serves as another obstacle to the adoption of a unitary definition. Still on the subject of the various contextualisation of terrorism, Santiago Ballina refuted the existence of a clear cut distinction between crime and terror, a dichotomous relationship where crime are regarded as mainly profit – and terrorism as ideologically-driven (Ballina, 2011). The author’s CVO three-dimensional model, however, highlights the possible existence of hybrid organisations that could alternate between profit and ideology, due primarily to their social cultural environment (pp. 130-131).
According to Lizardo (2008), other inhibiting factors to the emergence of a unified definition are results of some of the already existing definitions of the concept proffered by authors in the field. Lizardo asserted that the extant definitions fall within the ambience of vagueness or over specificity; place salience on some terrorism elements or the various groups that execute acts of terror (p. 91). Considering the broad frame of violent groups that employ this tactic, arriving at a definition would be challenging. For Grob-Frizgibbon (2005), some of the definitions are too inclusive (p. 235), while neglecting the vast applicability of the strategy as well as the distinctions between the groups that adopt the approach. According to the author, the all-embracing nature of the definition of terrorism, does not account for the differences in state – and sub-state terrorism; as well as the distinctions between the objectives of the diverse categories of sub-state terrorism (national, revolutionary, reactionary and religious terrorisms) (p. 236).
The border and membership (BM) and stretching and travelling (ST) problems of the terrorism concept as expounded by Weinberg, Pedahzur and Hirsch-Hoefler (2004, p. 778-779) to a large extent sum up the challenges that may have contributed to the lack of a generally accepted definition. Regarding the BM, the authors highlighted the difficulties in distinguishing terrorism from other forms of political violence, such as insurgencies, guerrilla warfare, and civil wars. Terrorism also encounters l
