Saturday #blueteam pondering -
Are lateral movement and privilege escalation two distinct concepts?
What is lateral movement really?
Have access here.
Want access over there.
Do things to exploit weakness.
Get access over there.
Lateral movement has happened.
This story is access centric.
Except, in common parlance:
. lateral movement is network centric.
. privilege escalation is access centric.
Gestalt for me: trouble comes when:
user account scope-of-access =
network-reach scope-of-access
Trying to illustrate -
What onwards value is domain admin on a member host without effective interactive network-reach to a DC? i.e. effective onwards network-reach scope-of-access is unavailable to other hosts.
In other words, achieving privilege escalation on a member host is little, when onwards network-reach scope-of-access does not include other hosts on the private network.
Scope-of-access is the key conceptual distinction for both account-level and network-level access.
Account scope-of-access is a long used concept, perhaps a little out of favour.
There are degrees of onwards network-reach. Necessary network connections between member hosts and DCs does not immediately equate to material scope-of-access.
I reckon ‘network-reach scope-of-access’ is a handy phrase. Perhaps it explicitly surfaces a concept in common use with graph theory modeling of attack paths?
Thoughts?
#blueteam
#lateralmovement #privelege_escalation
#mitre #mitreattack #mitreattck
#activedirectory
#infosec #cybersecurity