significant security risk
163595·updated Sep 1, 2026A risk-level characterization applied in security, privacy, and compliance contexts to a threat source, vulnerability, configuration, or actor whose assessed likelihood and potential impact together exceed an organization's or regulator's stated risk tolerance threshold — placing it in a priority tier that mandates active mitigation, escalation, or control action rather than acceptance or deferral. The concept underpins risk prioritization: quantifying or qualifying which risks must be addressed first, ensuring resources focus on the most consequential exposures. Frameworks including NIST RMF, FISMA, and CISA operational directives use the phrase descriptively — for example, CISA's Binding Operational Directive BOD 22-01 is titled "Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities," treating it as a threshold marker, not a defined term — and the same pattern appears across HIPAA, ISO 27001, and CIS guidance, where "significant" functions as a calibrated severity qualifier aligned to each framework's impact and likelihood scales.
Source
Users who pose a significantthe sentence this term was read in
generalized from a web lookup of the quoted expression at proposal time Verdict: compositional.
- Quantitative Risk Analysis: Its Importance and Implications
- Cybersecurity Compliance: Laws & Regulations to Know | Anchore
- Agentic Security- Emerging Threats, Mitigations and Challenges
- CIS RAM (Risk Assessment Method)
- Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) | CMS Information Security and Privacy Program
- HIPAA Security Rule | NIST
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 qualitative judgment, made within a risk assessment or access-governance process, that a particular condition, entity, or configuration raises the probability or potential impact of a security-relevant adverse event to a level that demands a prioritized response — above the threshold of routine or acceptable risk. Information security risk is "measured in terms of a combination of the likelihood of an event and its consequence," and the modifier "significant" maps to the middle-to-upper tiers of that combined scale: determining whether potential impact would be limited, serious, or severe — what NIST formalizes as low, moderate, and high impact levels. In practice, the phrase is used attributively — "users who pose a significant security risk," "vulnerabilities that pose a significant security risk" — to flag subjects that require elevated controls, accelerated remediation, or special authorization review, by identifying the most critical assets and ensuring the most significant risks are adequately addressed.
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
Classifications
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Variants
- plural
- significant security risks
- possessive
- significant security risk's
- pluralpossessive
- significant security risks'
Framework definitions
- §1 · attested_usage_reviewer_confirmed
- No definition is given in NIST SP 800-171r3. The term is attested in use at 1 citation in that document; a definition is pending curation.Increment 2: attested in 800-171r3 without a glossary definition.
- §1 · web_lookup_draft
- A risk-level characterization applied in security, privacy, and compliance contexts to a threat source, vulnerability, configuration, or actor whose assessed likelihood and potential impact together exceed an organization's or regulator's stated risk tolerance threshold — placing it in a priority tier that mandates active mitigation, escalation, or control action rather than acceptance or deferral. The concept underpins risk prioritization: quantifying or qualifying which risks must be addressed first, ensuring resources focus on the most consequential exposures. Frameworks including NIST RMF, FISMA, and CISA operational directives use the phrase descriptively — for example, CISA's Binding Operational Directive BOD 22-01 is titled "Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities," treating it as a threshold marker, not a defined term — and the same pattern appears across HIPAA, ISO 27001, and CIS guidance, where "significant" functions as a calibrated severity qualifier aligned to each framework's impact and likelihood scales.DR-088 backfill from the noun definition column