Modern attackers are increasingly sophisticated, often bypassing traditional security measures like microsegmentation. While microsegmentation helps limit lateral movement within your network, it doesn't prevent attackers from seamlessly navigating across your network, identities, and cloud environments. To truly secure your infrastructure, you need more than just segmentation.
In this article, we’ll explore why microsegmentation alone isn't enough and how combining it with advanced threat detection capabilities can provide comprehensive protection against evolving threats.
What is network microsegmentation?
At its core, microsegmentation reduces the "blast radius" of potential threats within a network by creating granular access control policies for users, applications, and services. These policies are designed to limit who can access what, based on their role or department. For example, marketing might have access to SharePoint and email, while IT security staff would have access to sensitive penetration testing reports.
Microsegmentation works by defining policies that restrict access based on user profiles, roles, and even individual devices. Some solutions require agents installed on each machine to monitor network traffic and visualize access patterns. This makes it easier for security teams to see where potential access violations could occur, helping limit lateral movement within the network.
While microsegmentation is effective at controlling access, it doesn’t address every security challenge. For instance, if an attacker manages to compromise a legitimate user’s credentials, they can bypass the segmentation policies because they appear to be a trusted entity. This is a critical vulnerability that microsegmentation alone cannot address.
Why modern attackers can bypass microsegmentation across networks, identities, and clouds
The main limitation of microsegmentation is that it focuses on preventing unauthorized access but doesn’t provide visibility into the behavior of legitimate users once their credentials are compromised. For example, an attacker who impersonates an employee can still access the same resources as the legitimate user, making it difficult for traditional access control policies to differentiate between normal and malicious activity.
Moreover, as your network grows and evolves, microsegmentation policies need to be continually updated to reflect changes in user access, application deployment, and threat landscape. But what happens when these policies become outdated, misconfigured, or incomplete? If a breach occurs and the attacker is able to exploit trusted relationships, they can move freely within the network, undetected.
This is where a threat detection and response approach becomes indispensable to complement microsegmentation.
How Vectra AI complements microsegmentation
The Vectra AI Platform is not just about monitoring network traffic — it provides end-to-end visibility, and connects the dots across networks, identities and cloud environments, to detect and respond to threats that bypassed preventative controls in real-time.
Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)
In today’s environment, attackers no longer hack in, they log in. The most critical threats often involve identity compromise. Vectra AI’s ITDR capabilities focus on detecting and responding to suspicious activities of human and non-human machine identities across organizations’ Active Directory, Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), Microsoft 365, Azure and AWS environment.
If an attacker gains access to an account or service through compromised credentials, Vectra AI can detect hybrid attacker techniques such as credential attacks leveraging zero-day techniques, the abuse of privilege credentials for lateral movement, creation of backdoor access, living-off-the-land attacks, etc. providing security teams with the insights they need to act quickly.
Threat Detection and Response for Cloud
As organizations move to the cloud, traditional security measures are often insufficient to protect against new risks in environments like AWS and Azure. Vectra AI’s Threat Detection and Response for Azure and AWS provides deep visibility into critical resources, identifying hybrid and multi-cloud attacks threats like credential abuse, unauthorized access, and unusual cloud resource usage.
By monitoring both user and machine behavior in the cloud, Vectra AI helps security teams spot malicious activity that might bypass traditional controls.
Network Detection and Response (NDR)
NDR is a crucial component of Vectra AI’s comprehensive threat detection capabilities. While microsegmentation creates internal access boundaries, it does not provide visibility into network traffic once an attacker has bypassed those controls. Vectra AI’s NDR monitors network communications in real-time, identifying anomalies such as unusual lateral movement or unauthorized access attempts that may signal a breach. It provides an additional layer of defense, helping security teams detect threats early, even if they manage to exploit legitimate access or move across segmented network areas.
By continuously monitoring network traffic, Vectra AI helps detect suspicious behavior that would otherwise go unnoticed, ensuring a quicker response to potential threats.
Together, Vectra AI’s Network, Identity and Cloud capabilities offer a comprehensive security layer that complements microsegmentation, ensuring that even if an attacker bypasses access controls or impersonates legitimate users, their behavior can be detected and mitigated in real-time.
Real-time threat detection: a critical layer
While microsegmentation is an effective preventative control, it doesn’t provide the real-time monitoring needed to detect sophisticated threats. Even with strict policies in place, an attacker who impersonates a legitimate user or exploits a misconfigured policy can bypass these controls. This is why a real-time detection and response capability is essential.
The Vectra AI Platform offers real-time monitoring across all layers of your network, identity and cloud environment. By continuously analyzing network traffic and user behavior, Vectra AI can spot suspicious activity that might go unnoticed by other solutions. Whether it’s an insider threat, a compromised identity, or an attacker moving laterally within the network, Vectra AI detects the telltale signs of malicious behavior and alerts security teams to take immediate action.
Building a comprehensive defense strategy
A robust security strategy doesn’t rely on a single technology or approach. Microsegmentation helps limit access and reduce the impact of a breach, but without a comprehensive threat detection system, it leaves critical gaps in your defense. The Vectra AI Platform, with its advanced threat detection and response capabilities, fills these gaps by providing visibility into network, identity, and cloud activity, ensuring that threats are detected and stopped as soon as they emerge.
Incorporating both microsegmentation and real-time threat detection into your security strategy ensures that you’re not just limiting access but actively monitoring for potential threats. This layered approach makes your defenses more resilient, allowing you to respond quickly and effectively to any malicious activity.
Take the next step in strengthening your network security
Are you ready to enhance your security posture with a comprehensive threat detection and response solution? Vectra AI offers a free, no-obligation security assessment to help you understand where your current strategy might fall short. Our experts will review your network, identity, and cloud security and provide actionable insights to improve your defenses.