In this study, we review the current approaches for confronting national security risks and threats, and how vulnerabilities of states weaken their capacity to respond to new forms of threats from within the security environment, whether regional or international. In the article, we also discuss how to deal with „black swans” in a risk context. „A black swan” is here understood as a surprising extreme event relative to one’s knowledge/beliefs and can be of different types. The article highlights that the aim of academic researches of this phenomenon it is to gain new insights by addressing the three types of black swans separately, motivated by the fact that they require different types of measures. The main conclusions of the article are that there is a need to extend the current risk conceptualization and treatment frameworks to include the black swan risk, and better understand what analysis captures and what lies within the management domain. At the same time, in the current security environment, security institutions need to rely not only on management and intuition, but also on integrated data to identify potential risks