The average cost of a data breach hit $4.88M in 2024, while the mean time to contain a breach (MTTC) totaled 64 days – on top of the 194 days it took organizations to identify them in the first place. Meanwhile, in the first three months of 2025, ransomware attacks more than doubled compared to the same period last year.
Despite rising cybersecurity investments, many organizations still struggle to contain security breaches before they spread to become headline-grabbing crises. Why?
Data breach responses have long anchored on detection as a prerequisite for containment; with modern network security solutions, containment can shift from a post-breach reaction to a built-in protection.
We’ll dive into the importance of breach containment in the modern threat landscape, clarify the role of containment in incident response, and outline best practices for building a proactive threat containment strategy.
What Is Data Breach Containment?
Data breach containment refers to the process of limiting the scope and spread of a cybersecurity incident before it causes widespread damage. It’s about blocking lateral movement, isolating compromised assets, and ensuring attackers can’t pivot through your environment.
Unlike breach detection, which identifies an attack in progress, containment ideally prevents the attacker from progressing beyond the compromised asset.
The Role of Containment in Cyber Incident Response
Containment is a core component of any effective incident response strategy. According to resources like the NIST Incident Response Recommendations and Considerations for Cybersecurity Risk Management and the FTC’s Data Breach Response Guide, limiting the scope of a breach is just as important as identifying it.
In other words, detection is important, but containment is key to preventing a data breach from becoming a disaster.
Shrinking the Attack Surface
A large attack surface gives cyber attackers more options – more ports, more credentials, and more systems to exploit. Containment strategies reduce exposure, limiting what an attacker can see or access even if they compromise an endpoint.
The smaller your attack surface, the less room there is to maneuver – and the easier it is to neutralize threats quickly. A properly segmented network architecture significantly limits adversaries’ blast radius by isolating and containing threats. As Dr. Chase Cunningham, aka Dr. Zero Trust, put it, “If your architecture is actually accurate and correct and segmentation is where it's supposed to be, it’s like in the Navy, we call it watertight integrity – I can take a missile hit; ship still stays afloat.”
Preventing Lateral Movement
Once inside the network, attackers often use legitimate tools and credentials to escalate privileges and move laterally. Without internal boundaries, this movement often goes undetected until it’s too late.
By prioritizing threat containment rather than detection only, security teams can prevent lateral movement and ensure that even if an attacker compromises one system, they can’t spread ransomware, access sensitive data, or disrupt operations.
Why Detection Alone Falls Short
Most detection tools are inherently reactive. They alert you after malicious behavior is underway – and since many attackers begin moving laterally within 30 minutes of initial compromise, those alerts often arrive too late. Worse, many lateral movement techniques subvert traditional detection tools, which is why breaches typically take so long to identify.
Although solutions like EDR systems and SIEM platforms are an important piece of the breach response puzzle, they offer limited real-time protection. According to António Vasconcelos, Customer Engineer at Zero Networks, “These are all areas of detection after the fact ... Visibility provides ways of understanding possible attack vectors and paths that organizations need to invest in to bolster security; unfortunately, more often than not, organizations don't have such a strategy defined, where detection is part of a cycle of continuous learning and improvement.”
Data Breach Containment Best Practices
While breach containment once necessarily followed threat detection and identification in incident response plans, modern solutions enable a more proactive approach. Now, organizations can build resilient network architectures that block attackers by default to prevent lateral movement in real time.
In other words, the ideal network protection strategy would feature built-in threat containment, achieved through best practices like holistic microsegmentation, robust identity access controls, MFA, and automation.
Isolate Compromised Systems Immediately
When it comes to a security breach, speed matters. With any cyber incident, the first step is to quarantine affected systems from the rest of the network to prevent spread.
This principle is core to NIST’s incident response lifecycle, but in reality, effective breach containment strategies start long before a compromise occurs. Proactive network security strategies like network segmentation and identity-based access controls ensure compromised assets are isolated instantly, shifting containment from a responsive activity to a preventative one.
Deploy Zero Trust Microsegmentation
Modern threats are stealthier and more sophisticated than ever – VLANs and rough segmentation aren’t enough to contain today’s attackers. As Crystal Chadwick, Customer Engineer at Zero Networks explains, “VLANs are falling behind in effectiveness because they are often full of holes so that no traffic between them is impeded. They give a false sense of security by appearing to segment assets when, in reality, they aren't properly configured for segmentation.”
Proactively containing threats requires more granular control. Zero Trust microsegmentation allows you to enforce fine-grained access rules based on roles, network behavior, and function. Systems and users are only able to communicate when explicitly allowed – everything else is blocked by default. As a result, an attacker’s blast radius is severely limited before they ever breach the network.
Implement Multi-Factor Authentication
Hackers don’t break in, they log in. With the right credentials, an attacker can move laterally across a network while blending in with legitimate traffic to avoid raising alarms. Privileged account risks, insecure remote access protocols, and relatively flat network architectures can all leave organizations vulnerable to identity-based attacks, which accounted for nearly 30% of cyber incidents in 2024. During the same period, it took an average of 292 days to identify and contain breaches involving stolen credentials.
Applying MFA to any sensitive protocol, operating system, or application cuts off many of attackers’ favorite pathways. With network layer MFA, organizations can even secure legacy tech, databases, and other historically risky assets, embedding containment into their infrastructure. This security is even further strengthened by layering identity and network segmentation; as Chris Turek, CIO at Evercore says, “The combination of network and identity segmentation capabilities redefines least privilege architecture, providing a level of protection that the market has never seen before. It allows security teams to control network device segmentation down to the port and protocol level and then layer complete control of user logon access by logon type – network, local, service, etc.”
Enforce Adaptive Security Policies
Modern networks are dynamic – static policies quickly become outdated but manual updates are slow, prone to misconfiguration, and often leave gaps during transitions.
Instead, policies should constantly adapt as the network evolves, using identity, behavior, and risk posture to guide access decisions. Automating policy creation and enforcement ensures containment strategies are always up to date, leaving no hidden gaps attackers can use to spread.
Cyber Resilience: Built-In Threat Containment
Proactive breach containment isn’t a discrete tactic – it’s a byproduct of resilient Zero Trust architecture. When assets are securely isolated and access is governed by granular controls, security breaches are automatically contained before spreading.
And the benefits aren’t just technical – they span:
- Reduced response time
- Minimized legal and regulatory exposure
- Lower operational disruption
- Faster recovery and lower total cost
A Zero Trust mindset requires that organizations assume that a breach is inevitable and focus on minimizing the blast radius – by prioritizing cyber resilience, you can rest easy knowing breach containment is built into your network’s foundation.
Block Cyberattacks in Real Time with Zero Networks
With Zero Networks’ next-gen microsegmentation, breach containment is effortless – and automatic. Our deterministic automation engine creates precise network rules and policies for assets, building a resilient network underpinned by least privilege principles to instantly contain threats.
For an inside look at how Zero preemptively contains breaches, take a self-guided product tour.