A senior network security engineer has been tasked to decrease the attack surface of the corporate network. Which of the following actions would protect the external network interfaces from external…

Removing registrar contact details reduces social engineering exposure but has no effect on network-layer scanning or the attack surface of external interfaces.

Attackers commonly use IP fragmentation to evade firewalls and IDS/IPS systems during network scanning, as fragments may bypass rule inspection individually. By proactively testing external interfaces against fragmented packet processing, the security engineer can discover misconfigured or vulnerable devices that fail to properly drop or reassemble malformed fragments, enabling remediation before an attacker exploits the gap.

A honeynet captures and analyzes attacker behavior after engagement begins but does not reduce the attack surface or prevent external interfaces from being scanned.

Filtering internal ICMP traffic only affects traffic already inside the network perimeter and actually increases risk by forcing attackers into more thorough TCP port scans rather than lighter ICMP probes.