While IT security teams often devote significant attention to perimeter protection, east-west traffic is outgrowing north-south traffic in both volume and strategic importance. This is driven by such factors as changes in data center scaling approaches, new big data analysis needs, and growing use of cloud services with a less defined perimeter. It’s more important than ever for IT security teams to develop their capabilities to prevent lateral movement in these types of environments.
Lateral movement is the set of steps that attackers who have gained a foothold in a trusted environment take to expand their level of access, move to additional trusted assets, and further advance in the direction of their ultimate target. It’s difficult to detect, as it often blends in with the large volume of similar legitimate east-west traffic in the environment.
There are also more sophisticated techniques that organizations can implement to improve lateral movement security. For example, our solution can provide ongoing and historical visibility of all east-west traffic and empower IT teams to use this insight to create proactive policies to prevent lateral movement.