Attack surface is all the places where unauthorized users can potentially access your systems. Some entry points are obvious: web servers, email, VPN gateways. Others are less visible: forgotten service accounts, misconfigured cloud storage, applications nobody’s touched in years.
Hackers assess what’s exposed, what’s valuable, and what’s easiest to exploit.
What Attackers Learn Before They Strike
Attackers research targets before launching attacks. LinkedIn profiles reveal organizational structure and technologies in use. Job postings describe your tech stack. Social media posts sometimes reveal details about projects, schedules, or problems the organization is facing.
This information helps attackers craft more convincing phishing emails and identify which systems to target. An attacker who knows your organization uses a specific application can reference it in phishing attempts. Someone who understands your organizational structure can impersonate the right person in a business email compromise.
The information is publicly available and hard to control, but understanding that attackers use it for reconnaissance explains why generic security awareness training doesn’t work as well as training that addresses specific scenarios employees might encounter.
How Attackers Get In
Most organizations get breached through phishing. The FBI recorded over 193,000 phishing complaints in 2024, making it the most reported cybercrime. An employee opens what looks like a legitimate invoice or urgent message from IT, and malware installs quietly in the background.
Stolen credentials work just as effectively. People reuse passwords across work and personal accounts. When passwords leak from breaches at other companies, attackers try those same credentials across thousands of organizations. Eventually something works, and they’re in.
Third-party access provides another entry point. Vendors, contractors, and service providers often need access to your systems, and this access frequently persists longer than necessary. A contractor finishes a project but their VPN account remains active. A vendor’s support technician gets remote access credentials that never expire. If those credentials get compromised or misused, attackers gain direct access without needing to breach your perimeter first.
Admin By Request’s Secure Remote Access solution addresses this by providing browser-based, just-in-time connections for vendors. Access is granted for specific sessions, automatically terminated when complete, and fully logged. No persistent VPN accounts, no forgotten credentials.
The initial compromise rarely happens at well-protected infrastructure. It happens at the weakest point: someone’s laptop, a forgotten test server, or a contractor account nobody’s thought about in months.
What Privileges Let Attackers Do
Getting into a network is one thing, but the real damage happens when they have elevated access. Attackers specifically look for accounts with administrative privileges because those accounts let them:
- Install additional malware
- Disable security software
- Access sensitive systems and data
- Create new accounts for persistence
- Move laterally to other machines
When users operate with permanent administrative rights, any compromise of their account hands these capabilities directly to the attacker. The phishing email that infected one workstation becomes a network-wide incident because the compromised user had admin access.
Malware behavior changes based on privilege level. Ransomware running under a standard user can encrypt that user’s documents. Ransomware with admin privileges can encrypt entire drives, disable backup systems, and propagate across the network.
Admin By Request EPM replaces standing privileges with just-in-time elevation. Users get admin access when they need it for specific tasks, but attackers can’t exploit privileges that aren’t constantly active. A compromised standard user account is still a problem, but it’s contained. The attacker can’t install persistent backdoors, can’t disable endpoint protection, and can’t easily move to other systems.
How Breaches Spread
Attackers establish their initial foothold, then look for ways to access other systems. They dump credentials from compromised machines, searching for accounts that can access servers, databases, or other workstations.
Network segmentation can slow this down, but if attackers find credentials with broad access, they can often bypass these boundaries. Service accounts that authenticate to multiple systems become particularly valuable targets.
The attacker’s goal is to map out your environment and find paths to valuable data or systems. Each compromised account reveals more of your network topology and provides potential jumping-off points to other machines.
The more accounts with elevated privileges, the more opportunities attackers have. Every workstation where a domain admin has logged in becomes a potential source for harvesting those credentials. Every service account with excessive permissions becomes a target.
Unpatched Systems Create Known Entry Points
Organizations patch critical servers quickly but let workstations, development systems, and secondary infrastructure fall behind. Attackers scan for these unpatched systems because exploits already exist and are often publicly available.
The timeline matters. A vulnerability gets disclosed, a patch gets released, and there’s a window before most organizations deploy it. Attackers operate in that window, hitting systems that haven’t been updated yet.
Some systems never get patched. Legacy applications that can’t be updated, test environments nobody manages, or servers running software that’s reached end-of-life all stay vulnerable indefinitely.
Shrinking the Attack Surface
Attack surface reduction happens across multiple areas. Strong authentication reduces the value of stolen passwords. Privilege management limits what compromised accounts can do. Network segmentation contains breaches. Patching closes known vulnerabilities. Monitoring detects suspicious activity before it spreads.
Attackers exploit whichever area is weakest. Organizations that secure one area but neglect others just redirect attacks to the unprotected gaps.
Privilege management addresses one of the most commonly exploited gaps: the difference between what users need to do their jobs and what attackers can do with compromised accounts. Removing permanent administrative access and providing just-in-time elevation instead means users can still perform necessary tasks, but attackers can’t leverage privileges that aren’t constantly active.
Understanding your attack surface is the first step. Reducing it requires action across multiple fronts, and privilege management is often the fastest area to address with immediate impact.
Want to see how just-in-time privilege elevation works in practice? Try our free plan for up to 25 endpoints or book a demo to see how Admin By Request can shrink your attack surface without slowing down your users.
