attack surface reduction (ASR)
What is Attack Surface Reduction?
Attack surface reduction is the practice of minimizing the number of potential entry points that attackers could use to compromise your systems. The smaller your attack surface, the fewer opportunities there are for bad actors to exploit vulnerabilities.
Why Reducing Your Attack Surface Matters
Every internet-facing asset - from exposed ports and login pages to forgotten subdomains and development environments - represents a risk. Attackers routinely scan for these weak spots to find ways in. Reducing your attack surface:
- Limits exposure to known and unknown vulnerabilities
- Helps prevent breaches caused by misconfigurations or forgotten assets
- Improves your security posture and supports compliance efforts
How to Reduce Your Attack Surface
- Discover: Find what you have that needs protecting. Automated asset discovery helps you find unknown assets like APIs, login pages, and subdomains.
- Detect: Use automated scanning to detect the services those assets expose.
- Reduce: Consider whether these services need to be exposed. Where possible, add additional security, such as requiring a VPN before reaching an administrative panel.
How Intruder Helps
Intruder makes attack surface reduction easy with proactive monitoring and discovery features:
- Automated discovery of subdomains, APIs, cloud services, and more
- Continuous scanning to catch newly exposed assets and vulnerabilities
- Context-aware risk scoring to highlight the issues that truly matter
By identifying what’s exposed and what needs fixing, Intruder helps you reduce your attack surface and stay one step ahead of attackers.
Ready to reduce your attack surface? Start a free trial or book a demo to see it in action.
