Initial Access

Definitions

1. The first foothold an attacker gains into a target environment, whether through phishing, exploited vulnerabilities, stolen credentials, exposed services, or supply-chain compromise. Understanding initial access is crucial because it often determines which preventive controls could have stopped the intrusion.

   In plain English: The first way an attacker gets into a system or environment.

   Example: "The investigation confirmed initial access came from a reused VPN password rather than the web application bug."

Related Terms

• Penetration Testing
• Honeypot
• Man-in-the-Middle Attack
• CVE
• XSS
• Spear Phishing
• Pentest
• CSRF