Attack surface

How it is used

Teams talk about reducing or shrinking the attack surface, for example by switching off unused services. 'External attack surface' means everything visible from the internet; tools that track it are called attack surface management (ASM) tools.

Example sentences

1. Every new cloud service we add increases our attack surface.

2. Turning off the old FTP server was an easy way to reduce the attack surface.

Common collocations

• reduce the attack surface
• external attack surface
• attack surface management
• expand the attack surface

Related terms

• open portA network port on a device that is accepting connections, which means a service is listening there and can be reached by others.
• hardeningThe process of making a system more secure by removing unnecessary software and services, changing default settings and applying secure configurations.
• vulnerabilityA weakness in software, hardware, a configuration or a process that an attacker could use to cause harm or to gain access they should not have.
• threatAnything that could cause harm to a system or to data, such as an attacker, a piece of malware, a careless employee or even a flood in the server room.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• attack surface · Software Engineering

More terms: Threats and Attacks

• phishing
• exploit
• compromise
• social engineering
• DDoS
• brute-force attack
• privilege escalation
• lateral movement
• SQL injection
• cross-site scripting
• man-in-the-middle attack
• threat actor