Best Tools for Lateral Threat Prevention: Microsegmentation Feature Guide

Nearly 90% of organizations experienced a cyber incident involving lateral movement in the last year; although more than 80% of security teams say they’ve adopted detection and response tools, it still takes an average of 181 days to identify a breach. Meanwhile, attackers begin moving laterally in as little as 51 seconds.  

Skilled cyber adversaries can pivot to critical systems before security teams even begin investigating the alert – if an alert triggers at all. The solution isn’t faster detection or more detailed dashboards, it’s preventing lateral movement in the first place with modern microsegmentation.  

Lateral Movement in Cyber Security: How Breaches Spread  

Lateral movement refers to the tactics an attacker uses to move “sideways” (East-West) across the network after gaining initial access, in search of sensitive data and assets. Lateral movement is a key element of the attack chain; it allows adversaries to:  

• Deploy persistence mechanisms to maintain access   
• Escalate privileges  
• Discover new systems and credentials   
• Reach high-value targets (like domain controllers or sensitive databases)    

In fact, lateral movement is so pervasive that the MITRE ATT&CK framework classifies it as a core tactic used in modern cyberattacks. An attacker may gain access to the network via phishing campaigns or compromised credentials, but lateral movement techniques are how hackers turn a minor breach into a major business disruption.  

Understanding Top Threats and Cybersecurity Trends  

Network security spending has risen nearly 18% since 2023, yet globally reported data breaches spiked 300%+ last year. Why the disconnect? Organizations have invested heavily in detection-centric strategies anchored on tools like EDR while deprioritizing protection; now, sophisticated attackers are exploiting the resulting protection gaps.  

To effectively prevent lateral movement, security teams need a clear view of the evolving threat landscape:

• Malware-free attacks are surging: Attackers are turning to living-off-the-land tactics – abusing legitimate tools, systems, files, or applications to blend in with normal traffic – in order to evade detection, with malware-free attacks making up 79% of threats cataloged in CrowdStrike’s latest Global Threat Report.  
• Shadow IT and machine identities create new vulnerabilities: In the AI era, shadow IT has opened up a new attack surface – IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report found that organizations with high levels of shadow AI use suffered $670k higher breach costs on average. Meanwhile, machine identities like service accounts, which create similar security blind spots and often operate with excessive permissions, now account for more than 70% of networked identities.  
• Privileged ports cause most cyberattacks: Administrative ports like SSH, RDP, and RPC are the key attack vectors in most breaches; in fact, RDP alone is involved in 90% of ransomware incidents. Still, most organizations leave privileged admin ports permanently open, leaving them vulnerable to the vast majority of attacks.  
• Access-as-a-service is booming: Identity-based attacks are accelerating, and that growth is partially driven by a booming access-as-a-service industry. As attackers ramp up the use of infostealers to collect valuable data like credentials, advertisements for access brokers have increased 50% YoY.  
• AI-enabled campaigns accelerate and scale threats: As attackers embrace AI, what once took weeks of reconnaissance now takes only minutes – 80% of cyberattacks reviewed in recent research from MIT leveraged AI, signaling that the speed and scale of AI-enhanced attacks are likely to continue accelerating.   

How Microsegmentation Prevents Lateral Movement  

To prevent lateral movement, organizations have to eliminate the internal pathways attackers rely on. Microsegmentation has long been hailed as the gold standard in lateral movement prevention because it contains a breach to the initial point of impact by proactively blocking unauthorized East-West traffic.

While traditional network segmentation divides a large network into smaller subnetworks (or segments), microsegmentation is a much more granular process that involves dividing all clients, workloads, applications, virtual machines, and operating systems into isolated segments, each functioning as an independent security zone.  

Still, as threats evolve rapidly alongside tech advancements, the divide between modern and legacy microsegmentation solutions has never been wider. To effectively prevent attackers from moving laterally, organizations should prioritize four key capabilities.  

4 Key Capabilities for Lateral Movement Protection: What to Look for in a Microsegmentation Solution  

Recent research from EMA on the maturing microsegmentation market uncovered the features security leaders consider most valuable in an innovative microsegmentation solution:   

• Fast, automated asset discovery and tagging that scales with growing environments 
• Automated policy creation and lifecycle management that reduces manual effort and ensures consistent enforcement  
• Integration with multi-factor authentication (MFA) to secure privileged access   

These responses mirror findings from a ViB Tech survey, where respondents ranked MFA overlay, automated policy creation, and agentless deployment as the most important capabilities for a microsegmentation solution. 

Industry leaders are signaling support for a similar set of microsegmentation capabilities – CISA’s latest Microsegmentation in Zero Trust guidance highlights the need for segmentation policies that evolve dynamically using contextual data, while Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle for Workload and Network Security recommends that organizations select microsegmentation solutions that map application paths and make policy recommendations, incorporate identity-based mechanisms, leverage automation, and coexist with existing infrastructure. 

These industry insights, further validated by emerging trends across the threat landscape, give security leaders a clear list of priority capabilities when evaluating microsegmentation solutions.  

Automated Policy Creation and Enforcement That Adapts to Network Changes  

Attackers thrive on change. New assets, privilege creep, shadow IT, untracked service accounts, and more create gaps wide enough for adversaries to move laterally.  

When policies are created manually, reviewed infrequently, and rarely updated at the pace attackers exploit, segmentation coverage lags far behind reality. To effectively block lateral movement, microsegmentation must do more than enforce static rules.  

Automated, deterministic policy creation addresses one of the most persistent weaknesses in lateral movement prevention – policy drift – by:  

• Automatically discovering all network assets 
• Learning legitimate communication patterns  
• Generating least-privilege policies based on observed behavior 

With this dynamic approach, microsegmentation solutions powered by deterministic automation eliminate the manual delays that attackers depend on. Crucially, deterministic automation also takes the guesswork out of microsegmentation since it’s based on observed network realities. For example, Zero Networks’ automation engine learns allowed network behaviors to create dynamic rules for identities and assets; Chris Boehm, Field CTO, says learning (without guessing) is key: 

When workloads shift, services scale, or identities change, segmentation policies update accordingly – without introducing blind spots or over-permissive access. 

Robust Identity Controls to Prevent Credential Abuse 

Lateral movement today is often identity-driven as attackers leverage living-off-the-land tactics to evade detection, leaving many organizations one stolen credential away from disaster.  

When attackers abuse trusted systems and masquerade as legitimate users to blend in with regular network traffic, the only way to prevent dangerous lateral movement is with granular identity-based controls. In other words, without identity-based enforcement, even segmented environments may remain blind to one of the most common lateral movement techniques used today. 

To address this risk, microsegmentation solutions should deliver:  

• Identity-governed control at the network layer 
• Granular access policies based on learned logon activities, account behaviors, and asset access patterns  
• Just-in-time MFA verification for privileged access – including admin ports, legacy systems, and other non-SaaS assets  

From a lateral movement standpoint, integrated identity controls break one of attackers’ most reliable techniques: reusing valid credentials as camouflage. Importantly, these identity-based policies should integrate with and inform microsegmentation. For example, Chris Boehm describes Zero Networks’ approach this way:  

Even if credentials are compromised, identity-aligned microsegmentation prevents attackers from silently traversing the network or escalating privileges to access sensitive data and systems. 

Comprehensive Coverage Across Environments  

Attackers follow the path of least resistance; inconsistent enforcement across environments opens up an easily exploitable course. Still, some segmentation solutions continue to offer only partial coverage. As Albert Estevez, Field CTO at Zero Networks, put it:  

To effectively protect against lateral movement, microsegmentation solutions must secure every asset – IT, OT, and IoT – across all environment types: on-premises, cloud, hybrid, and Kubernetes. This consistency ensures that attackers cannot bypass controls simply by pivoting to a less protected segment of the network. 

Seamless Integration with Existing Infrastructure  

Attackers are faster and stealthier than ever, yet legacy microsegmentation solutions require notoriously long and complex implementations – software deployed on hosts, specialized hardware, and architectural overhauls mean it can take years before an organization achieves meaningful segmentation coverage. In the meantime, security teams may have more visibility into lateral movement, but they won’t be any closer to preventing it.  

An agentless microsegmentation solution avoids implementation complexity and operational disruption, enabling an accelerated path to lateral movement protection. This is particularly important for enterprise environments where an agent-based approach means more potential points of failure.  

By orchestrating native controls, microsegmentation solutions can rapidly deliver comprehensive protection to secure East-West traffic without impacting operations.  

Automate Threat Containment with Zero: Proactively Block Lateral Movement  

Zero Networks builds resilience into the network architecture, automating threat containment with comprehensive, identity-aligned microsegmentation to ensure unauthorized lateral movement is blocked by default.  

Zero’s automation engine dynamically adapts security policies alongside network changes, and our agentless approach seamlessly integrates with existing infrastructure. The result? Granular protection that scales effortlessly to stop lateral movement before attacks spread.  

Learn more about how Zero delivers powerful lateral movement protection in one easy-to-use solution – request a demo.