Despite increased security efforts from IT teams, cyberattacks remain a serious threat. According to Statista, in 2024, about 65% of financial organisations around the world reported having a cyberattack, up from 64% in 2023 and 34% in 2021.
This shows that Cyber-attacks are growing more common and complex, with many users and organisations being targeted. One type of advanced attack is called a “Lateral Movement Attack.” Understanding what lateral movement is, how it happens, and how to prevent it is crucial for an organisation’s cybersecurity posture. Red Piranha’s Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response (TDIR) solution already aligns with the latest cybersecurity best practices from CISA to detect and mitigate lateral movement.
What is Lateral Movement?
Lateral movement is a tactic used by attackers who, after gaining control of one device, spread their access to other systems or applications within an organisation. This technique helps them stay hidden in the network and get closer to valuable assets. It can even let them take control of an administrator's machine, gaining access to its access privileges and data.
Lateral Movement follows a particular pattern:
- Initial Access: Attackers enter a system through methods such as phishing, malware, or sophisticated fileless malware techniques.
- Lateral Movement: Once inside, attackers navigate the network, leveraging vulnerabilities or stolen credentials to move from one system to another.
- Access to Sensitive Data: The goal is to access and exfiltrate sensitive data or compromise critical systems.
What are the Common Lateral Movement Techniques?
- Pass-the-Hash: Attackers extract password hashes from one system and use these to authenticate across other network systems, bypassing the need for plaintext passwords.
- Pass-the-Ticket: By stealing Kerberos tickets, attackers can authenticate to various network systems, including Active Directory environments. Techniques such as Golden Ticket and Silver Ticket attacks enable attackers to gain extensive, often unrestricted, access to network resources, leading to potentially catastrophic outcomes.
- Exploiting Vulnerabilities: Attackers exploit known or zero-day vulnerabilities within systems to gain additional access, facilitating further lateral movement across the network.
- Using Stolen Credentials: Valid credentials, once stolen, are used by attackers to authenticate and move laterally across different systems within the network.
Attackers often employ a combination of these techniques to maximise their chances of success. For instance, an attacker might use pass-the-hash to initially compromise a system and then leverage stolen credentials or pass-the-ticket methods to access additional systems. This multi-faceted approach not only enhances their foothold within the network but also makes detection and remediation more challenging.
Red Piranha’s TDIR leverages network-based and endpoint-based sensors to detect and address these lateral movement techniques, offering a proactive approach to align with best practices.
How Lateral Movement Works?
The main goal of an attacker is to find and steal or destroy valuable or sensitive information while staying undetected for as long as possible. After the initial breach, they will explore the network, steal credentials, and move across systems to access more data and systems. To understand lateral movement, you need to know its detailed stages, as explained in the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
Attackers seeking to evade detection often steer clear of known malware and exploits that might trigger signature-based intrusion alarms. Instead, they typically resort to tactics such as password theft or guessing to gain access to remote systems or escalate their privileges.
Frequently, they leverage existing, benign tools and processes installed on the host system to advance their attacks, a technique known as "living off the land" (LOTL).
For instance, they might utilise PowerShell, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), and PsExec for network reconnaissance and lateral movement.
These LOTL attacks are often termed "fileless" because they do not rely on traditional malware files. Although malware can be part of this approach, sophisticated attackers often use administrative tools and other legitimate resources to extend their reach while minimising their risk of detection.
Executing a targeted attack demands meticulous planning and sustained effort. A well-resourced adversary can generally infiltrate a targeted organisation, even if it necessitates compromising an individual’s personal accounts outside the network. The initial breach is merely the starting point.
The attackers then conduct a thorough mapping of the organisation’s network, navigate laterally to other devices, access critical servers or data, and ultimately either exfiltrate, alter, destroy, or hold hostage the targeted resources.
For example, in the SolarWinds cyberattack, attackers used a compromised update to gain initial access. They then used LOTL techniques, including PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), to navigate through SolarWinds' network and other connected systems. The sophisticated nature of this attack highlights the importance of understanding lateral movement tactics to enhance security.
Understanding and mitigating these lateral movement techniques is crucial for strengthening an organisation's cybersecurity posture. Advanced detection mechanisms, continuous monitoring, and proactive threat hunting are essential in identifying and stopping these attacks before they can cause significant harm.
How to detect Lateral Movement?
Lateral movement is challenging for prevention controls to block automatically, making early detection essential. The longer it goes undetected, the greater the damage and the higher the recovery costs.
While organisations may gather the data needed to detect lateral movement, the challenge lies in effectively utilising it. Tools such as SIEM are better suited for identifying clear cyberattacks rather than profiling activity or detecting anomalies related to lateral movement. This can often lead to excessive alerts that are often ignored.
Behavioural analytics, supported by machine learning, is effective in detecting lateral movement. By analysing key data from network, endpoint, cloud, and identity sources, security tools can identify abnormal user behaviour, such as a regular user acting as an administrator or the unauthorised use of administrative credentials.
Threat actors might compromise systems by installing malicious code or manipulating logon scripts. Cybersecurity teams can detect these tactics by monitoring for credential abuse and unusual login patterns, signalling potential compromise when regular users exhibit administrative behaviour. Red Piranha’s TDIR solution’s enhanced visibility and analytics capabilities are designed to align with guidance on leveraging behaviour analytics and proactive threat hunting to detect lateral movement early.
However, you can follow several best cybersecurity practices to minimise the risk of lateral movement attacks, including:
Assess the Awareness of the Attack Surface
The first step is to gain a clear understanding of the systems and devices within your network. This knowledge allows you to focus protection efforts on the most critical assets. Your cybersecurity approach should transition from solely perimeter defence to prioritising in-network detection.
To effectively implement this strategy, it’s essential to identify exposed credentials, misconfigurations, potential attack paths, and other vulnerabilities. Utilising Network Detection and Response and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) tools are crucial for gaining visibility into endpoint attacks and enhancing overall detection capabilities.
Examine Identities and Permissions
The second practice involves thoroughly investigating and understanding the permissions and identities within your network. This helps establish a baseline of what actions legitimate users should be performing. With this baseline in place, you will be able to identify behaviours that should not occur.
It's crucial to know which systems each user can access and what they are authorised to do with those systems. Implementing a Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) can address this challenge by granting users only the minimum access required for their roles and continuously validating their identities.
Examine privileged accounts on a regular basis
Monitor accounts with elevated privileges and restrict access to those who truly need it. It is strongly recommended that you conduct regular reviews of these accounts to identify any unusual activities.
Each user should be accurately categorised and granted access only to the systems, applications, or network segments necessary for their role. For instance, in a corporate network, only IT personnel should manage devices like desktops and laptops, and they should not assign administrative privileges to regular users. By deploying a multi-layered approach to segmentation, privilege management, and access control, Red Piranha’s TDIR aligns with best practices to reduce the attack surface and minimize the risk of lateral movement
Stopping and Preventing Lateral Movement with Red Piranha's TDIR (Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response)
Red Piranha's Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response (TDIR) solution excels in detecting and preventing lateral movement attacks through its comprehensive, integrated approach.
By using both network-based (Crystal Eye XDR) and endpoint-based (Crystal Eye XDR Endpoints) sensors, Red Piranha provides a unified view of all activities across the network and endpoints. This comprehensive visibility enables the TDIR solution to identify unusual patterns and behaviours indicative of lateral movement.
Network Detection & Response (NDR) analyses traffic and connections for anomalies, while Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) monitors activities on individual devices, ensuring that any unauthorised attempts to move laterally within the network are promptly detected.
Here's how it can detect and prevent lateral movement:
Detection of Lateral Movement:
- Enhanced Visibility: Red Piranha’s TDIR solution offers up to 10x increased visibility into network operations, crucial for detecting lateral movement. This enhanced visibility allows organisations to spot patterns indicative of lateral movement, such as abnormal user behaviour or unexpected attempts access to critical systems.
- Network Behavioural Analytics: By employing advanced heuristics and machine learning (ML) anomaly detection, TDIR can identify irregular network activities that traditional tools might miss. For instance, if an attacker uses pass-the-hash or pass-the-ticket techniques, these anomalies in authentication patterns can be flagged.
- Proactive Threat Hunting: The solution includes proactive threat hunting that specifically targets advanced persistent threats (APTs) and "Living off the Land" (LotL) tactics. This proactive approach is essential for detecting sophisticated lateral movement techniques that may evade signature-based detection methods.
- Human-Machine Teaming: The integration of human intelligence with automated systems ensures improved alert prioritisation. This means that when signs of lateral movement are detected, the alerts are contextualised and prioritised, allowing for quicker response times and reducing the likelihood of false positives.
- Multi-Tenanted Platform: The deployment across East-West traffic flows improves the detection of lateral movement, which often involves moving laterally across the internal network rather than in and out of the network perimeter.
Prevention of Lateral Movement:
- Automated Actionable Intelligence: Red Piranha’s TDIR solution provides automated, actionable intelligence that allows for real-time responses to threats. This includes isolating affected systems or blocking the attacker’s lateral movement before they can access sensitive data or escalate privileges.
- Flexible In-line Deployment: The solution is designed to integrate seamlessly into existing infrastructures without causing disruptions, allowing organisations to implement robust security measures without significant changes to their systems. This flexibility aids in quickly deploying necessary security controls to prevent lateral movement.
- SIEM Integration: Instant alerts and after-action reports from Red Piranha’s SOC ensure that any lateral movement detected is immediately escalated and responded to, minimising the window of opportunity for attackers.
- Response Mechanisms: TDIR's response phase involves taking decisive actions such as isolating compromised systems, removing malicious code, and patching vulnerabilities. These actions are crucial in stopping lateral movement in its tracks and preventing attackers from gaining further access.
Red Piranha’s TDIR solution meets and exceeds the best practices outlined in the joint guidance by delivering advanced visibility, real-time threat detection, and prompt response mechanisms for lateral movement and LOTL tactics.
Conclusion:
Red Piranha’s TDIR solution is well-equipped to both detect and prevent lateral movement attacks through a combination of advanced visibility, proactive threat hunting, automated intelligence, and seamless integration. By identifying suspicious activities early and responding quickly, it helps organisations maintain a strong defence against the increasingly sophisticated tactics used in lateral movement attacks. By aligning with the guidance for best practices on lateral movement detection and mitigation, Red Piranha ensures that organizations are equipped with the tools and strategies necessary to combat sophisticated threats effectively.