Most breaches don’t knock on your door; they enter silently.
It all started with a routine login. No alerts. No red flags. Just a user accessing a file they had access to. But who knew that behind that benign activity lay a compromised credential? The attacker had moved laterally across the network, escalated privileges, extracted sensitive data, and barely left a trace. The firewall didn’t see it coming because it wasn’t looking inside.
Welcome to the new battleground of cybersecurity – east-west traffic. And it’s where the most sophisticated threats thrive these days. As a matter of fact, 96% of lateral movement behavior goes undetected by traditional SIEM tools, leaving massive visibility gaps inside. Now that you are eager to explore the broader dimension in this context, let’s dive in.
Understanding East-West Traffic: The Invisible Threat Within
If we talk about traditional network security trends, most defenses tend to focus on north-south traffic, data moving in and out of the network. IDS/IPS systems, firewalls, and perimeter defenses are designed and developed to prevent external threats at the gate.
However, in a modern hybrid and cloud-native environment, real danger often lies within. East-west traffic refers to data moving between systems inside the network, servers, endpoints, containers, and cloud workloads. It’s basically the internal communication attackers exploit once they are inside it. And across the distributed infrastructures these days, internal traffic is growing exponentially and becoming increasingly opaque.
Why Traditional Firewalls Fall Short
Firewalls are effective at monitoring and filtering north-south traffic, with data flowing in and out of the network. But they fall short when it comes to internal visibility. Once an attacker successfully bypasses perimeter defenses, often through phishing, credential theft, or vulnerability exploitation, they can move laterally across the network, often undetected. This lateral movement is a critical phase in most breaches, and alarmingly, over 70% of successful cyberattacks involve it. Without visibility into east-west traffic, organizations are left exposed to stealthy threats operating within their own infrastructure.
Signature-based detection and static rule sets are no match for modern-day threats blending in with legitimate activities. The truth is, they were not built and designed to understand internal behavior. Additionally, they can’t adapt to dynamic, cloud-native environments. Result? Blind spots in internal network flows, allowing attackers to exploit with ease.
So, how do you close the gap? Let’s talk about real visibility, the one that lets you see what’s happening between systems, not just at them. EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) helps a lot by providing you with deep insights into what’s going on across individual devices, flagging unusual/suspicious behavior, and helping security teams respond quickly. But there’s the thing – EDR can only see the endpoint.
If an attacker compromises one device, they can still move laterally across the network, hopping between endpoints, servers, and cloud workloads, often without triggering any alarms. EDR doesn’t track that internal movement. And that’s exactly where east-west traffic becomes a blind spot.
The Emergence of East-West Threats
Attackers don’t rush to steal post-breach data; they blend in. They hop across systems using Living-off-the-Land (LotL)techniques, use legitimate credentials and escalate privileges to get their job done. These strategies rely on native platforms like WMI, SSH, and PowerShell to make malicious activities look like normal operations.
They also leverage encrypted command-and-control (C2 channels), making it harder to inspect traffic without impacting encryption.
Common east-west threat tactics include:
- Impersonation and credential misuse
- Data exfiltration via internal hops
- Privilege escalations across internal systems
- Zero-day exploitation bypassing signature-based tools
These threats can prove to be stealthy, persistent, and devastating, especially when security teams lack insight and visibility into internal traffic.
Visibility Is the New Perimeter
Organizations need deep visibility into internal traffic to defend against east-west threats. Well, this is easier said than done, especially when it comes to combatting these challenges.
- Encrypted traffic hiding malicious payloads
- Remote endpoints operating outside traditional boundaries
- Cloud workloads scaling dynamically
Solution? It lies in behavioral baselining, understanding what “normal” looks like, and using anomaly detection to identify deviations. This needs machine learning, advanced analytics, and real-time monitoring. Threats remain hidden without this visibility, slip past detection tools, and cause significant damage.
How Network Detection and Response (NDR) Fills the Gap
Network Detection and Response is a modern solution designed to monitor, inspect, analyze and respond to threats within east-west traffic. Talking about its key capabilities, well, they include:
- Encrypted traffic analysis without decryption
- Monitoring internal traffic across on-prem, cloud and hybrid environments
- Behavioral anomaly detection using AI/ML
- Real-time threat correlation and altering
Vehere’s NDR platform walks in and takes this further with:
- AI-powered detection adapting to evolving threats.
- Risk scoring prioritizing threats based on impacts.
- Contextual insights connecting the dots across systems.
Learn more about how Vehere’s Network Detection and Response platform empowers security teams with deep internal visibility.
Don’t Let Internal Traffic Be Your Blind Spot
The perimeter is no longer the edge of your network; it is everywhere. And the bad news? Attackers know it. To sum it up, east-west traffic is the new frontier of cybersecurity. Organizations are flying blind without visibility into internal communications. This, as a result, makes them vulnerable to stealthy, high-impact threats.
NDR (Network Detection and Response) is the key to unlocking that visibility because at the end of the day, it is not only about seeing more – it’s about cutting through the noise, with clarity, detecting what others miss, right where it matters the most.
See What Your Firewall Can’t
While traditional defenses stop at the perimeter, Vehere’s NDR goes deeper, monitors internal traffic, detects stealthy threats, and empowers your SOC with actionable insights. In a world where logs alone don’t reveal the full picture and static defenses fail to adapt fast, you don’t need more alerts, you need to see the why behind the traffic.
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