Reducing attack surface using system hardening techniques for UK SMEs

Practical guidance for UK SMEs on reducing attack surface through system hardening: define and test baselines, remove unnecessary services and legacy components, harden identity and administrative access (least privilege, MFA, separation of admin accounts), enforce consistent endpoint and server configurations via configuration management, limit lateral movement and privilege escalation paths, improve logging to detect drift, and adopt a simple, repeatable change workflow with documented exceptions.