Cyber threats have become complex issues far greater than data destruction or theft. With the expansion of technology, corporate networks are becoming more modernized, but with that comes the danger of malicious intruders who travel stealthily through the network. One of the most common cyber attack strategies employed is lateral movement.
In the current digital world, modern technologies play a significant role in an organization's business; lateral movement attacks pose a significant risk to the contemporary industry. Recent reports trumpeted that lateral movement techniques have been leveraged by more than 70% of successful cybersecurity breaches. These threats are eye-opening, and the organizations must adopt a proactive approach to protect their connected assets. The cost of such breaches is immense, with a single breach leading to loss of millions in terms of financial, business disruption, and further non-compliance with standards.
In this article, I'll explain the concept of lateral movement, its operations, why it is detected late, and most importantly, how to curb it.
What is Lateral Movement?
Lateral movement can be defined as a combination of methods that threat actors implement to traverse within an enterprise network after gaining basic entry. Unlike more common methods of an attack where data is fetched and retrieved from a given point, the attackers in this case ‘pivot’ from one system to another, obtaining sensitive data that is almost always restricted. Threat actors might deploy a backdoor, malware, compromise sensitive information, and largely evade the defensive security tools to steal information of high value.
Not every kind of cyberattack has the feature of lateral movement. The key feature of lateral movement is leveraging credential theft to further escalate deeply inside the enterprise networks. These types of attacks generally require complex threat detection and incident response systems, and typically they have a longer infection life cycle and response time.
The worst part is that traditional security appliances, including firewalls and antivirus scanners, cannot detect such sophisticated attacks where hackers use advanced evasion methods to bypass conventional security. The reasons for such avoidance could be that traditional firewalls were not designed to detect lateral movement attacks effectively; they lack granular visibility to monitor the entire spectrum of traffic within modern and dynamic enterprise networks.
Given 95 days as an average detection time to detect lateral movement attacks, the consequences of these complex attacks are disastrous, especially in critical sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, electric grids, etc.
A Look at the Key Properties of Lateral Movement
Privileged Escalation to Admin Rights
Threat actors often escalate their privileges to penetrate the enterprise network and steal more sensitive information by using vulnerability exploitation and misconfigurations as attack propagation vectors.
Enhanced Reach to Strategic or Critical Systems
After gaining the initial access, the hackers perform a deep scan of the network to identify targets of higher value or critical systems.
Network-wide Persistence
Undoubtedly, these kinds of cyber attacks have persistence in a network by setting up a backdoor or other form of access to continuously access the network even if one point of entry is closed.
Avoidance of Suspicious User Behavior in Monitoring Systems
Cyber attacks with lateral movements are used to evade the defensive security detection systems by using several evasion methods, such as encryption, masking with legitimate network traffic, file-less attacks, or leveraging the " Living off the Land " methods.
Tools to Launch Lateral Movement Attacks
Some of the more common tools and techniques used in lateral movement include:
- Pass-the-Hash
- Pass-the-Ticket Attacks
- Exploitation of remote services such as SMB, RDP, and WinRM.
- Using built-in Windows tools such as PowerShell and WMI.
- Credential dumping with Mimikatz or similar tools.
- Exploiting Active Directory misconfigurations.
Reasons Why Lateral Movement is Difficult to Prevent
Use of Legitimate Tools
Attackers often operate with tools within the ecosystem like “PowerShell”, “RDP”, or “PS Exec”, which makes distinguishing between benign and bad activities almost impossible. Such tools are part of everyday administrative work.
Credential Theft
Navigating systems by trusted users with adopted credentials is one way to ensure that the bare minimum alarms are sounded. Attackers may use key loggers, memory scrapers, or phishing to acquire these credentials.
Lack of Segmentation
The absence of proper segmentation in flat networks eases an attacker’s ability to move around different systems. The lack of internal firewalls or access control lists means an attacker will face little resistance when moving laterally.
Insufficient Logging and Monitoring
Weak logging with no central monitoring allows lateral movements to go unnoticed. Other useful indicators, for example, remote command execution, over-the-top file share access, or login access during odd hours, may all be ignored.
Slow and Low Techniques
These refer to the deliberately slow movements of attackers, imitating normal user behavior to avoid detection. Logging in during business hours using well-known hostnames will do the trick in this case.
Blending with Admin Traffic
Sophisticated attackers emulate admin behavior, making it harder for anomaly-based systems to differentiate.
Implementing Prevention and Protection Tactics for Lateral Movements
Network Segmentation
Consider dividing the network into functional blocks where users can be restricted from freely moving within the block, should they gain unauthorized access. Firewalls for controlling access to sensitive environments and VLANs for segmenting Micro Level Segmentation should also be applied to the most prized assets.
The Principle of Least Privilege
Users or services assigned access rights should be permitted to perform only actions or interact with strictly necessary resources. Remove admin privileges whenever possible. Audit access control functionalities periodically alongside privilege allocation.
Code Authentication
Additional authentication tools are called Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), which can be applied to critical frameworks like VPN, cloud, and privileged accounts/guarded. When credentials are believed to have been at risk, make sure MFA is focused on core frameworks.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
Deploy EDRs: Integrated cybersecurity systems responsible for managing detection and response at endpoint levels are meant to monitor suspicious actions like strange PowerShell login execution or irregular logins. Linking EDR to known threat intelligence guarantees the detection of active attacks mounted by malicious individuals.
Centralized Log Collection and Analysis
Use SIEM/SOAR Tools to gather all logs within the defined system borders and monitor events for peculiar activities on the Unified Security Information. All types of attempted authentication should be captured alongside filing access logs and process records that must be checked and reflected.
Proactive Threat Hunting and Regular Audits
Adopt a proactive security approach instead of a reactive one for continuous cyber threat hunting and early detection of future attacks. Employ methods to capture unusual, abnormal hosting behavior that deviates from the standard settings within the firewall and WMI. Adapt regular audits and security post-assessments.
