Extreme value theory has been used widely in many areas of science and engineering to deal with the assessment of extreme events which are rare but have catastrophic consequences. The potential of extreme value theory has only been recognized recently in finance area. In this paper, we provide an overview of extreme value theory for estimating and assessing value at risk and expected shortfall which are the methods for modelling and measuring the extreme financial risks. We illustrate that the approach based on extreme value theory is very useful for estimating tail related risk measures through backtesting of an empirical data.