Lateral movement risks in the cloud and how to prevent them – Part 1: the network layer (VPC)

Wiz Research outlines how adversaries conduct lateral movement within and across cloud VPCs by abusing remote services (SSH/RDP), worms, valid cloud/IAM accounts and keys, VPC peering, and exploitable vulnerabilities/misconfigurations; it contrasts cloud vs. on‑prem (IAM, rapid deployments, and visibility challenges), cites findings that 58% of environments have publicly exposed workloads with cleartext long-term cloud keys, and recommends five network best practices—strict security groups/ACLs, removal of cleartext keys via least-privileged roles and managed access, fast remediation of critical vulnerabilities, VPC-based isolation, and using private link over broad peering—to reduce attack surface and blast radius.