Minimizing Attack Surface

The Basics:

First, lets agree what attack surface is in the realm of cybersecurity. An attack surface is any service, application, protocol, or system that your organization utilizes that exposes you to potential cyberthreats. This definition is fittingly broad, as it acknowledges that every time you give a company access to your workspace your overall vulnerability increases. This is not always a bad thing, utilizing a password manager increases your attack surface but overall this improves the security of your organization or your personal workspace.

Our Recommendation:

This is a short post because we can’t give you advice for every situation that you encounter when deciding what apps to connect to and services to hire. We can simply remind you to stay paranoid and only increase your attack surface when the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Be aware of what has access to your critical data or services that you cannot operate without and be quick to remove access to services that you no longer need, and always be skeptical of free services. There are great and legitimate open source options available, and we will write a post about them sometime, but most services and applications that you need to run a business or live your daily life securely will cost money and this is not where people should be cheap.