What is an Attack Surface?
A cybersecurity attack surface is the total number of points of vulnerability in a system. The more points of vulnerability, the higher the risk that an attacker will be able to penetrate your system to cause an effect on, or extract data from that system.
Attack surfaces consist of hardware, software, and firmware — otherwise known as assets. Attack surfaces can be internal assets, external-facing assets, and public-facing cloud assets. In order to protect these systems, organizations need to identify what systems they have and how they interact with each other. Attack surface management is important because it helps identify and reduce vulnerabilities in a system.
