Understanding and Detecting Lateral Movement

**Executive summary:** This article explains lateral movement—the process attackers use to navigate and expand access within a breached environment to enable ransomware, data exfiltration, or persistent espionage—details common techniques (RDP, WMI, PsExec, SSH, lateral tool transfer, internal spear-phishing, token theft), and recommends mitigations such as real-time monitoring/MDR, behavior analysis, network segmentation, vulnerability management, and zero-trust.