Reducing the Attack Surface through Segmentation
Fewer exposed paths, fewer attack opportunities
Reducing the attack surface through segmentation means deliberately limiting the number of exposed paths, services and systems a potential attacker could try to exploit, grouping resources by function and sensitivity and restricting communication between groups that have no business reason to interact. In practice this forces organizations to map precisely which systems need to talk to each other and to remove legacy connections that exist only because nobody closed them, a common problem in networks that grew organically over years. A concrete example is a network printer or an IoT video surveillance system, devices that are rarely updated and often have known vulnerabilities, which, once segmented into an isolated zone with no direct access to critical servers, no longer represent a viable entry point to the rest of the infrastructure.