Mike Meyers' CompTIA Security+ Certification Guide, Second Edition (Exam SY0-501), 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 5

Securing Individual Systems

A typical security professional bandies about the term attack surface, meaning a cumulation of all the vulnerabilities for a specific infrastructure item. For a gateway router, for example, the attack surface refers to every option that an attacker might use to compromise that router, from misconfiguration to physical damage or theft (Figure 5-1).

Figure 5-1 An attack surface

This chapter explores the attack surface of one of the most vulnerable parts of networks, the individual systems. An individual system for the purposes of this chapter is a single computer running Windows, macOS, Linux/UNIX, or Chrome ...