How to Prevent Lateral Movement: Cybersecurity Risks and Strategies

Lateral movement is how attackers escalate minor footholds into major breaches – and few networks are designed to prevent it. A single compromised system exposes 85% of the network within one hop, and attackers can begin moving laterally in as little as 27 seconds.  

Cybersecurity teams know that preventing lateral movement is key to stopping minor cyber incidents before they escalate into enterprise-wide disruption, but applying controls robust enough to effectively halt attackers has historically been considered too complex and disruptive.    

To clarify the destructive network security risks lateral movement poses – and how to prevent them entirely – we’ll explore the underlying vulnerabilities that enable lateral movement, how attackers exploit them, the growing threat of AI-driven lateral movement (AILM), and practical strategies to proactively lock down lateral movement.  

What Is Lateral Movement? Definition, Causes, and Examples

Lateral movement in cybersecurity is the tactic attackers use to move “sideways” (East-West) across the network after gaining initial access, often in search of sensitive data and assets. In other words, lateral movement is how attackers turn a small foothold with minimal access into a widespread security breach impacting business-critical systems. In fact, lateral movement is so pervasive that the MITRE ATT&CK framework classifies it as one of the core tactics used in modern cyberattacks.  

Attack Phases	What Happens
Preparation	Rocennaissance and resource development. Happens outside the victim's network; there is little a defender can do at this stage.
Infiltration	First attacker access to the victim environment. Under "assume breach," defenders should plan as if this stage has already succeeded.
Host Taking	Activity on a compromised workload: execution, persistence, defense evasion, privilege escalation. Mitigated primarily by EDR and EPP.
Lateral Movement	Command-and-control, discovery, collection, credential access and movement betweek workloads
Damage	Exfiltration and impact. By this stage, the organization is in damage control, not mitigation

From Compromise to Privilege Escalations: What Causes Lateral Movement?

Lateral movement starts with an initial compromise; today, the most common initial access vectors are vulnerability exploitation, phishing, and credential abuse. With that first foothold, attackers can move laterally through the network when controls aren’t sufficient to stop privilege escalation.  

According to Zero Networks’ analysis of 5.4 trillion activities across 312 enterprise environments, the top 10 risks that enable lateral movement are:  

1. Broad Internal Admin Protocol Exposure 
2. Excessive Internal Reachability 
3. Excessive Privileged Access 
4. Overprivileged Service Accounts 
5. Legacy Authentication Paths 
6. Exposed Control Plane Infrastructure 
7. Internal Vulnerability Pivoting 
8. Lack of East-West Visibility 
9. Single Endpoint to Critical Asset Reachability 
10. Poor Containment Readiness 

These risks represent the structural exposures most responsible for converting a single compromise into enterprise-wide impact. 

Lateral Movement Examples: Notable Incidents

High-profile breaches often use lateral movement to expand blast radius and access critical assets; notable examples include:

• MITRE/Ivanti breach: In January 2024, MITRE’s network was compromised through two zero-day vulnerabilities in Ivanti VPN solutions. The attackers moved laterally through the network by leveraging a compromised admin account, establishing persistent access and harvesting credentials. This breach highlighted the importance of prevention in network security strategies, rather than overreliance on detection and response.
• Change Healthcare ransomware attack: Shortly after the MITRE/Ivanti breach, Change Healthcare was targeted by the ALPHV/Blackcat ransomware group, resulting in the exfiltration of 4TB of data. The attackers infiltrated the network by exploiting compromised credentials; after that, they deployed ransomware and demanded a hefty ransom.
• AT&T breach: In 2024, AT&T confirmed that a threat actor had gained unauthorized access to internal systems by using stolen credentials associated with a third-party vendor. Once inside, the attacker moved laterally to access and exfiltrate customer data, including passcodes and Social Security numbers. The breach underscored a critical gap: MFA was not in place for the compromised entry point. With network-layer MFA and strict privilege enforcement, the attacker’s access could have been blocked before any data was exposed.

What Types of Cyberattacks Use Lateral Movement?

Many attacks rely on lateral movement to maximize their scope and achieve a specific goal. Some attack types that commonly involve lateral movement are:

• Ransomware: To demand the highest possible payout, ransomware aims to infect and encrypt as many systems as possible. Lateral movement enables ransomware to spread rapidly across the network, reaching critical assets and increasing pressure to pay.
• Data Exfiltration: Once inside the network, attackers move laterally to locate sensitive data like personal records, IP, or financial information before transferring it outside the network for ransom, sale, or public exposure.
• Botnet Infection: Lateral movement helps attackers quietly add devices to a robotic network (botnet), growing their control before launching larger-scale operations like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Critically, lateral movement isn’t just a supporting tactic, it’s the key mechanism for turning small compromises into large-scale incidents.  

Why Does Lateral Movement (Still) Happen?

Lateral movement isn’t a new concept, yet it remains a tried-and-true technique in cyberattacks. Why? It essentially comes down to complexity – both of modern environments and the solutions designed to secure them.   

Still, security leaders working in sectors that mandate robust security postures can’t afford to leave lateral movement unchecked. As Aaron Steinke, Head of Infrastructure at La Trobe Financial put it, “We’re a financial institution, we are very paranoid, that’s the nature of working in finance. Getting control over lateral movement in our network is really essential, and it’s a hard thing to do.”   

Between hybrid system sprawl, vulnerable privileged accounts, and traditional segmentation solutions too complex to deploy at scale, lateral movement remains a pressing cybersecurity risk – one that’s only growing more urgent in the AI era.  

The Growing Threat of AI-Driven Lateral Movement (AILM) 

AI-driven lateral movement or AI lateral movement (AILM) is a tactic where adversaries use AI to accelerate the attack chain – achieving impossibly fast breakout times as a result – or weaponize overprivileged AI agents’ legitimate connections to pivot between systems.   

As AI adoption proliferates, innovation has outpaced security and rapidly expanded attack surfaces. As a result, 57% of organizations have already seen an uptick in security incidents linked to AI usage; nearly two-thirds of organizations don’t have the necessary policies to manage AI or detect shadow AI.   

In many cases, AILM isn’t functionally different than any other type of lateral movement – it’s just far faster. Attackers weaponize the same network vulnerabilities that have always existed, compounded by excessive permissions for AI agents, to expand breach impact faster than any human response cycle can match.  

Microsegmentation is the gold standard in locking down lateral movement, but traditional tools left it out of reach for many organizations.  

Legacy Microsegmentation Implementation Challenges

Unlike traditional network segmentation strategies – which involve dividing a large network into smaller subnetworks, or segments – microsegmentation is a much more granular and robust process that isolates all clients, workloads, applications, virtual machines, and operating systems into segments with individual security perimeters.

In other words, if an attacker manages to access a microsegmented network, they’ll find themselves immediately stranded. The only problem is: legacy microsegmentation solutions are typically so complex that many implementations stall or fail outright.

Nicholas DiCola, VP of Customers at Zero Networks summed up this problem: “Networks are too open, and accounts are too permissive. Once you’re inside the network, it’s very easy for an attacker to move laterally. How do we stop lateral movement? The root way to stop that is by microsegmenting the network – there were some companies out there that were doing that already, why were they not successful? What’s missing? It’s too hard, it takes too much time.”

These labor- and time-intensive implementations are why just 5% of organizations are microsegmenting their networks today, despite grasping the importance. Traditional microsegmentation solutions often require:

• Significant manual work: From manual asset tagging and grouping to policy creation and management.
• Long implementation times: As DiCola said, “Most CISOs move every three to five years on average – they start these projects that don’t even finish by the time the CISO leaves because it just takes a lot of human effort to manage.”
• Agent-based architecture: Since most traditional solutions require installing agents on endpoints, scaling, configuration, and maintenance is difficult.

Although microsegmentation is an accepted best practice for locking down lateral movement, the complexity of legacy solutions has long outweighed the potential benefits.

Privileged Account & Identity Threat Vulnerabilities

Once inside a network, attackers often seek to escalate privileges, exploiting admin and service account vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or stolen credentials. Weak identity controls make it easier for attackers to:

• Leverage excessive logon permissions
• Use pass-the-ticket, golden ticket, Kerberoasting, and other attacks
• Move laterally across the network without raising alarms

Without strict identity and access controls, hackers don’t have to break in – they can log in. Since the process is generally manual, lengthy, and complex, governing access rights remains a challenge for organizations trying to lock down lateral movement.

How to Detect and Prevent Lateral Movement

Lateral movement happens fast – in this era of AI-accelerated attacks, cyber adversaries can begin moving laterally less than 30 seconds after gaining initial access. That means security teams must shift from reactive alerts to proactive control, prioritizing robust prevention strategies that contain threats before they escalate on top of the detection techniques most organizations already have in place.  

Detecting Lateral Movement

Attackers work hard to stay under the radar, blending in with legitimate traffic and using native tools to avoid triggering alerts. To catch them in time to prevent damage, organizations must deploy layered detection techniques capable of identifying subtle anomalies:  

• Real-Time Monitoring: Detection hinges on recognizing deviations from normal behavior. Always-current network visibility enables teams to recognize suspicious patterns that don’t match documented baselines. Ideally, a visibility tool should be integrated into a platform that also enables real-time enforcement, enabling security teams to quarantine threats in a click.  
• Behavioral Analytics: Machine learning models trained on user behavior can identify deviations like unusual login times, odd file access patterns, or abnormal administrative actions – all signs of potential lateral movement.  
• SIEM & Log Analysis: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms correlate logs and events across the network, detecting unusual patterns and surfacing potential lateral movement paths.   
• Network Traffic Analysis (NTA): NTA tools evaluate network flow and flag anomalies that could suggest unauthorized East-West traffic, leveraging algorithms to distinguish normal network behaviors from harmful activities.   
• Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): EDR systems monitor endpoint and network events, helping teams investigate access attempts to high-value systems and track attack progression.  
• Deception Technology: Honeypots and decoy systems lure attackers into revealing their presence, offering early detection of lateral movement activity with minimal risk.  
• Log Management: Centralized log management and analysis solutions sift through access patterns to catch potential privilege escalations or stealthy jumps across systems.  

While lateral movement detection is an important component of a well-rounded cybersecurity strategy, relying too heavily on detection is risky – alerts often arrive too late, don’t fire at all, or don’t add meaningful value. In fact, just 30% of alerts translate to real risk reduction as many attackers move laterally in the shadows.  

Preventing Lateral Movement

Preventing lateral movement outright is the most effective way to stop an attack before it spreads. An ideal prevention strategy combines network controls, identity governance, and automation to seal off potential pathways and reduce the blast radius of a breach.  

Security teams can proactively block lateral movement by:   

• Embracing modern microsegmentation: As we’ve already established, microsegmentation is a powerful way to limit communication between assets unless explicitly allowed. By isolating systems into smaller, controlled network zones, organizations can ensure that even if one system is compromised, the attacker can't easily pivot to others.  Modern microsegmentation reduces the complexity of legacy approaches by integrating directly with existing infrastructure, orchestrating native firewall rules, and eliminating manual work from implementation and ongoing maintenance with robust automation.   
• Automatically enforcing dynamic policies: Static policies can’t keep up with today’s fluid IT environments. Instead, security teams should adopt automated policy creation and enforcement, where rules are generated based on observed behavior and continually updated as the environment evolves.   
• Enforcing least privilege access: User permissions should be tightly controlled using the principle of least privilege (PoLP). Each user, device, AI agent, or application should only have access to the resources required for their role or function. This minimizes opportunities for attackers to exploit over-privileged accounts during a lateral move.  
• Integrating MFA across the network: Beyond user logins, MFA can be applied to critical systems and privileged ports. This approach ensures that even if credentials are compromised, access isn’t granted without a second form of verification, dramatically reducing the attacker’s ability to move laterally.  
• Adopting a Zero Trust mindset: The zero trust model assumes that every device, user, and connection is untrusted until verified – a mindset aligned with this model requires that security accept breaches as inevitable. In practice, this means consistently verifying identity, limiting access, and segmenting network traffic to neutralize threats and stop lateral movement before it begins.  
• Building a layered defense: To truly prevent lateral movement, organizations must adopt 3D network security that not only safeguards against East-West movement, but that also minimizes attackers’ entry opportunities with robust North-South protection (barring entry from the outside world), and Up-Down protection that dynamically controls access to sensitive areas of the network based on identity.   

With strategies like these, security teams can finally control lateral movement before a breach becomes a disaster.   

Stop Lateral Movement in Real Time with Zero Networks

Zero Networks makes lateral movement a relic by delivering automated, identity-based microsegmentation that automatically contains threats to the point of initial access. Unlike the legacy solutions with complex, never-ending implementations, Zero Networks goes live in days – not years – and enforces least privilege access at scale.  

Here’s how Zero Networks locks down lateral movement in record time:

• With automated asset tagging, grouping, and policy creation and management, Zero generates deterministic, fine-grained rules – no complex configurations required.
• Our infrastructure-agnostic solution orchestrates native firewalls to secure every asset and integrate seamlessly into existing environments – without the manual complexity of traditional solutions
• Just-in-time MFA applied at the network layer keeps privileged ports closed until verified, shutting down credential abuse and privilege escalation
• With adaptive policy enforcement, Zero dynamically maintains granular controls that evolve alongside your network

Modern cyber attackers don’t stop at the perimeter – neither should your defenses. With Zero Networks, it’s easier than ever to build a proactive, layered defense that halts lateral movement and leaves hackers stranded – request a demo to learn more.