Lateral movement is one of the most dangerous stages of a cyberattack. Once attackers breach the perimeter, they don’t stop there. Instead, they quietly fan out across an environment, probing for sensitive systems, extracting data, or positioning themselves for disruptive actions, such as ransomware deployment.
How and Why They Do It
- Expand access: Gaining a foothold on one machine isn’t enough. Attackers move laterally to discover other assets, including servers, databases, and privileged systems.
- Evade detection: Instead of deploying noisy malware, attackers often use built-in administrative tools, which allow them to blend seamlessly with legitimate traffic, bypassing many traditional signature-based defenses.
- Maintain persistence: By establishing backdoors across multiple endpoints, attackers ensure they can reenter the network even if one access point is discovered and closed.
- Exfiltrate data: Once critical systems are discovered, attackers locate data of interest and begin planning extraction.
By leveraging lateral movement, attackers expand the scale of their cyberattacks while remaining under the radar, making it one of the most insidious phases in a breach lifecycle. Fortunately, Illumio offers strong countermeasures against lateral movement attacks through its microsegmentation solutions. To learn more, click here to schedule time with a solutions architect!