Report
2026 Lateral Movement Exposure Report
How Internal Trust Turns Breaches Into Business Outages
The question isn't whether attackers get in. It's how far they travel once they do. Zero Networks analyzed 54 trillion activities across 312 live enterprise environments. What we found should concern every board, CIO, and CISO:
- 80% of enterprise servers are reachable from anywhere inside the network
- 87% accept inbound RDP or SSH from broad internal sources
- 43.2% of internal authentication still runs on NTLM
- A single compromised host can reach 85% of internal systems on the first hop
"The industry spent years focused on keeping attackers out. But in the AI era, the biggest question facing defenders is what happens after they get in."
– Dmitri Alperovitch, Co-Founder of CrowdStrike, President of Silverado Policy Accelerator
Get a 10-risk framework for lateral movement exposure, real-world attack scenarios, benchmark data you can act on, and a first look at AI-Driven Lateral Movement – the emerging attack category compressing breach timelines from days to minutes.
"When I first saw Zero Networks, I walked away saying, this is too good to be true. When we put it in production, it was like a dream came true."
"My first impression was, it is too good to be true. The ease of deployment was shocking to me. It’s a simple and elegant solution to a very difficult problem."
"Zero Networks has become a core component of our security stack. It is something that we cannot live without any longer."
"Zero Networks is a game changer. The military-grade security it delivers across segmentation, access, and user rights, makes it a new cornerstone technology."
"I had to see it to believe it. The product was up and running in 15 minutes, it’s set it and forget it, and gives me peace of mind."
"When we ran pen tests before Zero Networks, attackers would get in within 5 minutes. Now, they cannot move laterally. It's a superb tool."
"We were having problems stopping some of the traffic in a pen test. Once we had Zero Networks in play, we were able to stop these activities."
"After [implementing] Zero Networks, we were able to lock down endpoints both on the server and on the laptops, our attack surface has decreased... incredibly."
"To do this by GPOs would have taken 300% more effort… we needed one FTE just to do this before Zero. Now, we can easily share the work."
"I would highlight the simplicity of [Zero Networks], both in the implementation and in the policy solutions that it generates for you. It's like they say in my department – it's black magic."
