The Attack Surface is Calling

Bare Metal Cyber’s 2025 essays on breakouts, identity, and modern defense

In 2025, the loudest cyber headlines all pointed to the same quiet truth: the “outside vs. inside” model doesn’t match how compromises actually happen anymore. Attackers don’t need a dramatic front-door breach when they can move through identities, vendors, remote access paths, SaaS platforms, and software supply chains. At the same time, defenders are expected to stay resilient through outages, respond faster than the news cycle, and govern automation and AI that can help—or hurt—at scale.

The Attack Surface Is Calling is a curated annual of Bare Metal Cyber’s 2025 Headline essays, organized into a cohesive narrative across six parts. This is not a checklist, and it’s not a raw archive. It’s a shelf-ready collection designed to translate what happened into decisions you can defend—technically, operationally, and organizationally.

Here’s what you’ll get inside:

• 🧭 From borders to breakouts: why perimeter thinking keeps failing, and what replaces it when trust becomes the real control plane

• 🧨 Zero-days and intrusion tradecraft: how modern attackers gain footholds, pivot, and hide in “normal” pathways

• 🧑💻 Identity and the human attack surface: phishing, weak MFA, shadow IT, and the messy reality of access in real organizations

• ☁️ Cloud resilience under pressure: where outages and breaches share root causes, and how blast radius becomes the new design constraint

• 🤖 AI on offense and defense: what automation genuinely improves, what it breaks, and why policy without enforcement becomes theater

• 🚨 Detection and incident response reality: ransomware pressure, SOC overload, response readiness, and how teams actually perform under stress

• 🧾 The world outside your network: dark web intelligence, regulations, state-sponsored activity, and supply chain transparency that’s usable—not performative

Who this book is for:

• 🛠️ Security practitioners who need clear thinking that survives contact with production

• 🧠 Security leaders who must explain risk, tradeoffs, and priorities without buzzwords

• 🔍 Auditors and governance teams who want proof-oriented language, not hand-waving

• 🎓 Learners who want a grounded map of what mattered in 2025 and why it still matters

If 2025 taught anything, it’s that the attack surface isn’t a diagram—it’s a living system of trust, dependencies, and human decisions. This collection captures those lessons while they were still fresh, so you can revisit them, share them with your team, and build modern defense posture rooted in evidence and response-ready thinking.