Performing lateral movement

Lateral movement can be carried out using different techniques and tactics. Attackers utilize them to move within the network from one device to the other. Their aim is to strengthen their presence in a network and to have access to many devices that either contains valuable information or are used to control sensitive functions such as security. In this section, we go through the most common tools and tactics.

Port scans

It is probably the only old technique that has remained in the hacking game. It has also remained fairly unchanged and therefore gets executed the same way through various tools. Port scans are used in lateral movement for the purpose of identifying systems or services of interest that hackers can attack and attempt to capture valuable data from. These systems are mostly database servers and web applications. Hackers have learned that quick and full-blown port scans easily get detected and therefore they use slower scanning tools that get past...