Value at Risk (VaR)
Also known as: VaR
Value at Risk (VaR) is a measure from financial risk management that estimates the potential loss over a defined time period at a given confidence level. A statement like 'there is a 5% chance of losing more than $2M over the next year' is a VaR statement.
Applied to cybersecurity, VaR aggregates the exposure of individual assets — their revenue, cost, and customer impact — into a single portfolio figure. It lets security leaders express risk the way finance expresses market or credit risk, and it is often paired with tail measures such as CVaR to capture worst-case losses.
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