The concept of minimizing attack surfaces relates to which security practice?

Minimizing attack surfaces is a fundamental aspect of system hardening, which involves configuring a system to reduce its vulnerabilities and points of potential attack. This security practice includes removing unnecessary services, applications, and user accounts, as well as applying security patches and updates, thus reducing the number of ways an attacker might exploit a system.

System hardening focuses on securing a system by ensuring that only essential components are running, which in turn limits the exposure of vulnerabilities that could be targeted. By effectively minimizing the attack surface, organizations can significantly decrease the likelihood of unauthorized access and exploitation by malicious actors.

In contrast, concepts like data encryption, backup creation, and network segmentation serve different purposes in security strategies. Data encryption protects information by making it unreadable to unauthorized users, backup creation ensures data can be restored after loss or attack, and network segmentation helps control data flow and limit potential breaches within a network. Each of these practices complements system hardening but does not specifically address the reduction of attack surfaces as directly as system hardening does.