Lateral movement is a technique used by attackers to expand their foothold within a compromised environment by moving from one system, service, or identity to another. After gaining initial access—whether through a phishing email, misconfigured cloud resource, or exploited vulnerability—threat actors often perform lateral movement to escalate privileges, discover sensitive assets, and progress toward their ultimate objective, such as data exfiltration or ransomware deployment.
Lateral movement is a hallmark of sophisticated attacks and a critical stage in the kill chain. It allows attackers to evade detection, bypass segmentation controls, and blend into legitimate network activity.
What is lateral movement?
Lateral movement refers to the process by which an attacker navigates within a compromised environment, often across systems, users, or workloads, to reach high-value targets. Rather than immediately exploiting or exfiltrating data from the initial point of access, attackers use that position as a launchpad to explore the internal environment, access additional credentials, and gain deeper control.
This movement can occur across:
- Endpoints within a corporate network
- Virtual machines, storage, and services within a cloud environment
- Containers and Kubernetes clusters
- Identity and access management (IAM) roles, tokens, and API keys
SaaS applications connected via APIs or identity providers
Lateral movement techniques often rely on legitimate tools and protocols, making them difficult to detect using traditional perimeter defenses.
Why lateral movement is dangerous
Lateral movement significantly increases the impact of a cyberattack. A breach that starts with a single exposed server or compromised credential can quickly escalate into a full-blown incident affecting critical infrastructure, sensitive data, or entire cloud environments.
It is dangerous because:
- It turns minor misconfigurations into major risks
- It enables attackers to find and exploit cloud or network topology weaknesses
- It allows access to crown jewels—such as databases, admin credentials, or customer records
- It bypasses traditional detection methods by using approved services and accounts
- It increases the time an attacker can dwell undetected in the environment
In cloud-native environments, lateral movement is often identity-driven. Attackers exploit over-permissioned roles, exposed tokens, or misconfigured IAM policies to move across services and accounts without deploying malware or triggering alarms.
Common lateral movement techniques
Attackers use a variety of tools and tactics to move laterally within an environment. Common techniques include:
Credential dumping: Extracting stored usernames, passwords, or access tokens from memory, configuration files, or password managers
Pass-the-hash and pass-the-ticket: Using stolen authentication artifacts (such as NTLM hashes or Kerberos tickets) to impersonate users and access other systems
Remote services exploitation: Using remote desktop protocol (RDP), Secure Shell (SSH), or Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to access additional hosts
Abuse of built-in tools: Leveraging legitimate tools such as PowerShell, PsExec, kubectl, or cloud CLIs to avoid detection
Pivoting through network paths: Exploiting network connectivity or lack of segmentation to traverse environments
Abusing cloud permissions: Using IAM roles, temporary credentials, or misconfigured identity federation to access services and data in other regions, accounts, or tenants
Accessing CI/CD and automation tools: Moving laterally through pipeline services or configuration tools to compromise additional infrastructure
Many of these techniques are difficult to detect without correlating behavior across identities, assets, and configurations.
Lateral movement in cloud environments
In the cloud, lateral movement is less about hopping between physical machines and more about navigating services, identities, and permissions. Because cloud environments are heavily API-driven and identity-centric, attackers often move laterally by:
- Assuming IAM roles that allow access to other services or accounts
- Exploiting access policies on storage buckets, queues, or databases
- Using compromised CI/CD tokens to modify infrastructure as code
- Moving across virtual networks due to misconfigured firewalls or security groups
- Escalating privileges within container or Kubernetes environments
Cloud environments also introduce unique challenges:
- Resources are often ephemeral, complicating detection
- Logs may be fragmented across providers and regions
- Misconfigured IAM roles may grant unintended cross-service access
- Assets may be exposed to the public internet without proper monitoring
Detecting and stopping lateral movement in the cloud requires full context of how identities, assets, and configurations interact.
How to detect and prevent lateral movement
Stopping lateral movement requires a combination of preventative controls and real-time detection. Key strategies include:
Implement least privilege access: Grant only the permissions necessary for users and workloads to perform their tasks. Regularly audit and right-size IAM policies, roles, and service accounts.
Enforce network segmentation: Limit communication between workloads using firewalls, security groups, and Kubernetes network policies.
Monitor authentication activity: Look for unusual login attempts, cross-region access, or role assumption from unfamiliar IP addresses or geographies.
Detect abnormal behavior: Use behavioral analytics to identify suspicious lateral movement patterns, such as unexpected process launches, new connections between services, or spikes in permissions usage.
Harden workloads: Disable unnecessary services, limit container capabilities, and apply pod security standards.
Enable logging and telemetry: Collect and analyze logs from endpoints, cloud services, identity providers, and APIs to gain visibility into attacker behavior.
Use attack path analysis: Map out how risks connect in the environment to understand which assets are vulnerable to lateral movement and prioritize mitigation efforts.
Organizations that proactively address these risks reduce the likelihood of attackers reaching high-value targets—even after an initial breach.
How Orca Security helps
The Orca Cloud Security Platform identifies and helps prevent lateral movement in cloud environments by providing deep, agentless-first visibility across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Kubernetes.
With Orca, security teams can:
- Analyze risks holistically and dynamically to surface critical attack paths that facilitate lateral movement and endanger high-value assets
- Analyze IAM configurations to uncover risky privilege relationships across cloud services
- Identify containers, workloads, and VMs with misconfigurations or runtime risks that could be leveraged for movement
- Prioritize the remediation of lateral movement risks and leverage AI-Driven features to reduce mean time to remediation (MTTR)
Orca enables organizations to stop lateral movement before it starts by closing the gaps attackers exploit to escalate access and reach critical resources.
