Protecting against lateral movement and privilege escalation
Assuming your network was breached, an attacker will likely try to gain knowledge about the network and systems by using discovery and reconnaissance techniques. Many of these techniques require little to no privileges to run once they're inside the network. Some examples of discovery tactics that produce useful information include running network scans to identify potential hosts, running vulnerability scans to find hosts that are not patched against known weaknesses, and gathering information by enumerating cloud services and domain policies. Even the slightest bit of information, as trivial as it may seem, could be used against you to find potential security gaps. A few examples of how these reconnaissance activities could be used to launch an attack are as follows:
- Password and Group Policy discovery information can be used to fine-tune methods that are used in brute-force attacks and reduce the chances of...
