Cybersecurity Glossary

Attack Surface

Everything about your organisation that an attacker could try to reach.

What Attack Surface means

Your attack surface includes public websites, remote access, cloud tenants, staff accounts, suppliers with access, and devices. It grows quietly: a test site nobody removed, an old subdomain, a service account created for a project that ended. Reducing it is often cheaper than defending it.

Why Attack Surface matters for small businesses and nonprofits

You cannot protect what you have forgotten. In many incidents the entry point is a system the organisation no longer knew it had, which is why inventory is a security control rather than an administrative chore.

What to do about Attack Surface

Three steps to deal with Attack Surface

  • Inventory every internet facing service and domain you own
  • Decommission properly rather than leaving old systems running quietly
  • Recheck after every project, since projects leave things behind

Not sure where you stand on this?

We review your current setup against the basics, tell you plainly what is covered and what is not, and give you a ranked list with effort and cost. No jargon and no scare tactics.