Identity-Based Lateral Movement occurs when adversaries leverage valid, authenticated identity tokens or elevated privileges to traverse cloud services, SaaS applications, enterprise systems, resource tenants, hybrid infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and machine identity networks. This represents lateral movement without malware—attackers navigate using identity, not exploits.
Cloud-Native Pivoting
Attackers impersonate legitimate users, administrators, service principals, or machine identities to pivot through any system that trusts those credentials.
Cross-Environment Movement
Movement spans from SaaS to cloud, cloud to SaaS, between tenants, and across user to app to machine identity chains.
Zero Malware Required
Identity serves as the universal passport—no exploits, no abnormal binaries, no EDR triggers, just authenticated movement.
Attacker Objectives
1
Cross-Platform Pivots
Pivot from SaaS to cloud infrastructure, cloud to SaaS applications, and between isolated tenants using identity trust.
2
Identity Chain Escalation
Move strategically from user accounts to application identities to machine credentials, escalating across resource providers.
3
Resource Access
Reach internal systems via SSO trust relationships to access compute resources, storage systems, and sensitive data repositories.
Identity-based movement represents the cloud-native evolution of lateral movement. Unlike traditional network-based pivoting, this stage operates entirely through authentication and authorization mechanisms—no malware, no exploits, no abnormal binaries, and no EDR triggers. Defenders must shift from detecting malicious files to identifying anomalous identity behavior patterns across distributed systems.