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Software Engineering vocabulary · APIs, Networking and Security

Lateral movement

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In software engineering, lateral movement means: The way attackers move from the first compromised machine to other systems inside the same network, looking for valuable data or higher privileges.

In Turkish: yanal hareket, yatay hareket

How it is used

A key phase in incident analysis and in frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK. Defenders try to detect and limit lateral movement with segmentation, EDR and monitoring of admin logins. Reports say that attackers 'moved laterally'.

Example sentences

  1. We saw lateral movement from the HR laptop to two file servers.

  2. Segmentation made lateral movement much harder for the attackers.

Common collocations

  • detect lateral movement
  • move laterally
  • limit lateral movement
  • MITRE ATT&CK
  • network segmentationDividing a network into separate zones, with controlled traffic between them, so that a problem in one part cannot easily spread to the others.
  • privilege escalationGaining higher access rights than one was given, for example moving from a normal user account to administrator, usually by abusing a flaw or misconfiguration.
  • compromiseTo get unauthorised access to or control of a system, account or network, so that it can no longer be trusted.
  • EDREndpoint detection and response: security software on laptops and servers that records activity, detects suspicious behaviour and lets analysts investigate and respond remotely.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: APIs, Networking and Security

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