Threat Modeling: Who Is Your Adversary?

Free lesson 1 of 10 from Anonymity & OPSEC — Stay untraceable: Tor, VPNs, and the discipline that keeps researchers safe. No account, no card.

Anonymity is not a tool — it's a discipline

Privacy tools only work if they match the threat you actually face. Before you touch Tor or a VPN, you build a threat model: a clear answer to four questions.

There is no such thing as "perfectly anonymous". There is only anonymous enough against a defined adversary. A journalist protecting a source, a researcher probing an authorized target, and a privacy-conscious citizen all model different threats.

🎯 Challenge: Write a one-line threat model for a security researcher publishing a vulnerability report and worried about retaliation from the vendor. Name the asset, the adversary, and the capability you must defeat.
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Asset: the link between your real identity and the report. Adversary: the vendor (and anyone they hire). Capability to defeat: tracing the publication back to your name, IP, or accounts. Your controls follow from this: anonymous publishing channel, no identity crossover, metadata-clean documents.

⚖️ This course is for privacy, journalism, and authorized research only — defensive skills to protect legitimate work, never to evade accountability for wrongdoing.

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