What Does Lateral Movement (Cybersecurity Attack) Mean?
Lateral movement is a technique that cyber-attackers use to stealthily explore a target network or cloud environment, learn its vulnerabilities and escalate access privileges to reach their target. The goal of malicious lateral movement is to gain access to the target, explore as much of the target as the attacker’s access credentials allow and look for other vulnerabilities that can be exploited to escalate privileges. Typically, a malicious actor will look for a misconfigured device, vulnerable software application, or access credential that can be compromised.
Techopedia Explains Lateral Movement (Cybersecurity Attack)
People should think about lateral movement not as an attack in itself, but as a critical phase of an attack where the attacker is seeking out their next machine or identity to compromise after they gain their foothold.
