Map Lateral Movement with Tanium Impact - Tanium Tech Talks #123

With nearly five years of evolution behind it, Tanium Impact has matured into a powerful tool for visualizing and disrupting lateral movement before it happens. In this episode, Josh walks through how Impact builds a graph of your environment using sensor data, Active Directory relationships, and session analysis to expose credential-based risk. You’ll see how nested group memberships, exposed sessions, and misconfigured privileges can create invisible pathways for attackers, and how Impact helps you find and fix them.

Whether you’re responding to an incident or proactively hardening your environment, this episode shows how to use Impact to prioritize remediation, scope blast radius, and reduce risk fast. With new UI enhancements, Tanium Threat Response integration, and a sneak peek at upcoming session termination capabilities, this walkthrough is packed with actionable insights.

Key takeaways

• Lateral movement is a component of every breach. Tanium Impact helps you proactively identify where attackers could go next before they get there.

Every single breach or compromise that happens includes a lateral movement component in the attack chain. So once an adversary lands inside the environment, they immediately start looking for where else they can spread.

• Impact builds a graph of your environment using Tanium sensor data, Active Directory synchronization, and session analysis to map exposure and control relationships.
• Identify nested accounts and groups risk across Active Directory domains. Impact reveals direct and indirect control relationships, including deeply nested group memberships that can unintentionally grant admin privileges across endpoints.

[Read also: What is Active Directory security? Risks and best practices]

• Tanium Directory Query and Criticality shared services are essential components for enabling Impact. Directory Query pulls user, group, and computer object data from AD, while Criticality assigns importance levels, called Criticality levels, to assets like endpoints, users, and groups.
• Use Criticality levels to prioritize triage. Assets can be marked as low, medium, high, or critical. Defaults are applied to domain controllers and privileged groups using well-known SIDs.
• New UI enhancements include a tabbed Findings view, column-based filters, and a Shortest Path graph that visualizes how credentials can be used to move laterally.

If an attacker lands on, let’s say, this top endpoint here, we see the outbound is zero. That means there’s no lateral movement potential from this starting point, and we can easily remediate it.

• Quickly scope endpoints during incident response. Use outbound hop analysis and visual graphs to determine where a compromised user or endpoint could move laterally and where to focus your investigation.
• Session analysis shows which users have active or inactive sessions on endpoints, what login types were used, and whether credentials are exposed.
• See lateral movement impact on alerts in Tanium Threat Response. Impact integrates with Threat Response to show how far an attacker could move from an alert’s origin point, helping prioritize triage and response.
• Upcoming features include session termination via Tanium Automate, enabling security teams to immediately cut off access for compromised accounts.

Additional resources

• Tanium Impact technical overview
• Tanium Threat Response integration documentation
• Tanium Criticality user guide
• Tanium Directory Query user guide
• SSH Snake – Tanium Tech Talks #95