significant risk
163606·updated Sep 1, 2026A classification or threshold judgment applied during risk assessment that identifies a risk whose combination of likelihood and potential impact — including harm to individuals (financial, reputational, physical, or rights-related), to organizational operations, or to both — is severe enough to compel a mandatory response: escalated controls, a formal impact assessment, breach notification, or cessation of the activity. Risk is commonly calculated as a function of likelihood and impact, and in privacy and security contexts a primary consideration is harm to individuals, not just organizational impact. Under HIPAA/HITECH, for example, the concept is operationalized as a breach that "poses a significant risk of financial, reputational, or other harm to the individual," making the threshold determination a prerequisite for breach-notification obligations. In U.S. state privacy law, the parallel trigger is "significant risk to consumers' privacy," which requires a formal risk assessment before the activity may begin. Across frameworks the expression functions as a gate: risks below the threshold may be accepted or mitigated in the ordinary course, while risks that meet or exceed it tr
Source
Significant risks associated with individuals are discovered.the sentence this term was read in
generalized from a web lookup of the quoted expression at proposal time Verdict: compositional.
- Privacy Risk Assessment: From Art to Science, By Metrics
- © 2011 Breach Risk of Harm Assessment
- Navigating the Where, When, and What of Data Privacy Risk Assessments | News & Events | Clark Hill PLC
- www.nist.gov
- Significant risk definition
A definition generalized from search results is a draft to react to, not provenance. Confirm it against an authority document before this term is verified.
A web lookup ran when this term was proposed
A judgment-based classification within risk assessment processes that identifies evaluated risks whose combination of likelihood and potential harm to individuals, organizations, or systems crosses a threshold warranting priority attention, mandatory disclosure, or heightened controls. It is distinguished from ordinary risk by its magnitude or severity as assessed against an organization's or regulator's tolerance criteria — for example, under GDPR the equivalent trigger for a Data Protection Impact Assessment is "high risk" to natural persons, while Article 35(3) offers non-exhaustive examples of processing likely to result in high risk, such as systematic automated profiling producing legal or similarly significant effects on individuals. Across frameworks including ISO 27001, NIST 800-53, PCI DSS, and SOC 2, the phrase functions as an ordinary evaluative modifier applied contextually within risk assessment outputs — auditors examine how organizations identify risks, evaluate their likelihood and impact, and prioritize them based on business objectives — rather than as a term of art carrying a single, standardized cross-framework definition.
Advisory only. A term this product ships is defined by an authority document, not by a search result.
Proposed during multiword review of this document in the CKI mapping queue.
Attested in
No recorded attestations. They are written when an MWE tagging stage is completed, stamped with the pack version and the document’s digest.
Classifications
Entity Type
Sensitivity
Information Class
Variants
- plural
- significant risks
- possessive
- significant risk's
- pluralpossessive
- significant risks'
Framework definitions
- §1 · web_lookup_draft
- A classification or threshold judgment applied during risk assessment that identifies a risk whose combination of likelihood and potential impact — including harm to individuals (financial, reputational, physical, or rights-related), to organizational operations, or to both — is severe enough to compel a mandatory response: escalated controls, a formal impact assessment, breach notification, or cessation of the activity. Risk is commonly calculated as a function of likelihood and impact, and in privacy and security contexts a primary consideration is harm to individuals, not just organizational impact. Under HIPAA/HITECH, for example, the concept is operationalized as a breach that "poses a significant risk of financial, reputational, or other harm to the individual," making the threshold determination a prerequisite for breach-notification obligations. In U.S. state privacy law, the parallel trigger is "significant risk to consumers' privacy," which requires a formal risk assessment before the activity may begin. Across frameworks the expression functions as a gate: risks below the threshold may be accepted or mitigated in the ordinary course, while risks that meet or exceed it trDR-088 backfill from the noun definition column