According to the 2026 Lateral Movement Exposure Report, organizations continue to leave internal pathways open, enabling cyber-criminals to move freely across environments and expand the impact of a breach.

While many organizations have invested heavily in perimeter security, attackers are increasingly focusing on what happens after the initial compromise.

Whether through stolen credentials, phishing attacks, un-managed devices or vulnerable applications, a single entry point can become the starting point for ransomware, data theft, operational disruption and privilege escalation.

The report highlights several alarming trends:

• 80% of enterprise servers are reachable from anywhere inside the network
• 87% accept inbound RDP or SSH connections from broad internal sources
• 78% are accessible through SMB or WinRM, protocols frequently abused by attackers
• Many organizations have already adopted AI-powered tools and agents, yet governance controls have not kept pace

The Growing Importance of Zero Trust

Traditional security models often assume that internal network traffic is trustworthy.

Today’s threat landscape proves otherwise.

A Zero Trust approach minimizes the attack surface by continuously validating identities, enforcing least-privilege access, segmenting networks, and monitoring suspicious activity across the environment.

Rather than focusing solely on keeping attackers out, organizations must also limit their ability to move once inside.

Key security capabilities include:

• Identity and access management
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
• Privileged Access Management
• Network segmentation and micro-segmentation

The message from the latest research is clear: the question is no longer whether attackers will get in, but how far they can go once they do.

Organizations that proactively reduce lateral movement opportunities will be better positioned to contain threats, maintain business continuity, and protect critical assets.

Feel free to contact us (sales@idc.it) for an obligation-free chat to demonstrate how Zero Networks can help improve your organization security!