Did you know that legitimate users can be a threat to your network? Since everyone is securing their networks against unauthorized access by hackers, attackers have devised ways to gain authorized access by pretending to be legitimate users instead.

It's not bad enough that these threat actors bypass your authentication system. They leverage the access privilege to compromise your system to the letter via lateral movement.

Find out how lateral movement works and how you can prevent it.

What Is Lateral Movement?

Lateral movement is a process whereby an attacker gains access to your network with correct login credentials and exploits the privileges of a legitimate user to discover and escalate vulnerabilities.

Having passed through your entry point, they move along the lateral lines, looking out for weak links they can exploit without suspicion.

How Does Lateral Movement Work?

Man Working on a Computer

Lateral movement isn’t your typical kind of cyberattack. The intruder deploys advanced techniques to front as a valid user. To achieve their goal, they take their time to study the environment and determine the best ways to strike.

The stages of lateral movement include the following.

1. Information Gathering

Due diligence plays a key role in lateral movement. The attacker collects as much information as they can about their targets so they can make well-informed decisions. Although everyone is vulnerable to attacks, threat actors don’t target just about anyone. They put their money where their mouth is by gunning for networks with valuable information at every point in time.

To determine the entities worth their time and effort, the attacker monitors them closely via several channels such as social media, online repositories, and other data storage platforms to identify the vulnerabilities to exploit.

2. Credential Theft

Armed with vital information about their target, the threat actor swings into action by gaining access to their system via credential dumping. They ride on the coattails of the authentic login credentials to retrieve sensitive information they can use against you.

Committed to covering up their tracks, the attacker configures your system to prevent it from raising any alarm about their intrusion. Having done that, they continue their theft without any pressure of getting caught.

3. Unrestricted Access

At this stage, the cyber actor is more or less an authentic user of your network. Enjoying the privileges of legitimate users, they begin to access and compromise multiple areas and tools within your network.

The success of the attacker’s lateral movement lies in their access privileges. They aim for unrestricted access so they can retrieve the most sensitive data you store in hidden places. Deploying tools such as Server Message Block (SMB), these cybercriminals don’t undergo any authentication or authorization. They move around with little or no obstruction.

Why Do Cybercriminals Use Lateral Movement for Attacks?

Hacker

Lateral movement is a favorite technique among highly skilled attackers because it gives them an edge during an attack. The most outstanding edge being that it can easily bypass detection.

Force is a common factor in cyberattacks—actors break into systems by all means. But that’s not the case in lateral movement. The intruder does the hacking in retrieving your authentic login credentials and then gains access through the front door like anyone else.

The most effective attacks are those executed with insider information because insiders understand the little details. In lateral movement, the hacker transitions into an insider. Not only do they enter your network legitimately, but they also move around undetected. As they spend more time within your system, they understand its strengths and weaknesses and devise the best ways to escalate those weaknesses.

How to Prevent Lateral Movement Threats

Despite the unassuming nature of lateral movement attacks, there are some measures you can take to prevent them. These measures include the following.

Evaluate Your Attack Surface

To effectively secure your network, you must understand the elements within it, especially all possible areas through which a cyber threat actor can gain unauthorized access to your network. What are these attack surfaces, and how can you secure them?

Addressing these questions will help you channel your defenses efficiently. And part of that includes implementing endpoint security to push back against emerging threats within your attack surfaces.

Manage Access Controls and Permissions

Lateral movement raises questions about the activities of legitimate users. Having authentic login credentials doesn’t exonerate a user from indulging in malicious activities. With that in mind, you need to implement standard access controls to identify every user and device that access your network.

Legitimate users shouldn’t have unrestricted access to all areas of your network. Building a zero-trust security framework and an identity management system to manage users' access and the activities they perform within the parameters of their access.

Hunt for Cyber Threats

Lateral movement brings the importance of proactive security to the fore. You don’t have to wait until the chips are down to secure your system with reactive security. By then, the damages would have already been done.

Actively seeking cyber threats will expose hidden threat vectors in lateral movement. An advanced threat intelligence platform can discover the most inconspicuous lateral movement activities. It will take away the luxury of time a lateral movement actor usually has to discover and escalate vulnerabilities, thereby sabotaging their efforts early enough.

Measure User Behavior

Black Boy Browsing on a Laptop

Tracking and measuring the activities of seemingly legitimate users can help you prevent threats before they escalate. Significant changes in user behavior can be due to a compromise. When a particular user performs activities they would normally not perform, that’s an anomaly you need to investigate.

Adopt security monitoring systems to record users' activities on your network and flag off suspicious moves. Leveraging machine learning and behavioral AI technology, some of these systems can detect lateral movement in real-time allowing you to resolve such threats promptly.

Automate and Orchestrate Response

Lateral movement functions on advanced technology. To detect and resolve it effectively, you need to orchestrate and automate your incident response plan. Orchestration helps to arrange your defenses while automation heightens the response time.

Deploying an effective security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) system is essential to streamline your response and prioritize threat alerts. If you fail to do this, you may suffer response fatigue from responding to harmless or false alarms.

Prevent Lateral Movement With Active Security

The rising security awareness has seen cyber threat actors deploying advanced skills to launch attacks. They are resorting to non-forceful techniques like lateral movement that raise no alarm to access and compromise systems.

Having an active security framework is a sure way to prevent cyber threats. With your torchlight shining in the nook and cranny of your system, you'll find threats in the most hidden places.