Lab 1: From Idea to Threat Model
Turn a fictional malware idea into a structured lifecycle and threat model, the first step before any design gets built.
The brief
Take a fictional malware scenario and analyse it into a lifecycle and a threat model: what it targets, why, and what it would need to do to succeed.
Before any malware is designed, it exists only as an idea: a target, a motive, and a rough shape of what it should accomplish. This lab makes that first step explicit. Working from a fictional scenario, students construct a threat model, naming who is targeted, why, and by whom, together with a lifecycle that lays the idea out as the stages a real development process would need to pass through.
The point is translation rather than invention. The scenario itself is supplied, and the work lies in turning a loose idea into the structured form the remainder of the course’s malware-development lifecycle depends on. A student who completes this lab should be able to examine any malicious-software idea and state what lifecycle stage it occupies and what threat model it implies.
What you submit
- A written threat model naming the scenario's target and motivation
- A lifecycle diagram or structured breakdown of the malware's stages
Due: 3 August 2027 ·Weight: 2% of the course grade
How it is marked
Assessed on whether the response translates an idea into a structured lifecycle and threat model, not on the idea's originality alone.
Key dates
- Submission due: 3 August 2027
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- submitted by the deadline, in the format named below
- translates the given scenario into a structured lifecycle and threat model rather than restating it
- the written threat model names the scenario's target and motivation
- a lifecycle diagram or structured breakdown lays out the malware's stages
- demonstrates the judgement to say, of a comparable malicious-software idea, what lifecycle stage it is at and what threat model it implies