80% of Enterprise Servers Are Wide Open Once Attackers Get Inside, 2026 Lateral Movement Exposure Report Finds

Zero Networks, the leading provider of Zero Trust security solutions, announced the inaugural 2026 Lateral Movement Exposure Report, analyzing 54 trillion activities across 312 enterprise environments over a period of one month. The report found that 80% of enterprise servers are reachable from anywhere inside the network – creating greenfield conditions for ransomware, operational disruption, and full-environment compromise. This internal traffic, known as East West traffic, represents more than 70% of a company’s communications – yet it remains unprotected.

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Alongside the report, Zero Networks is launching Breach Map, a free tool that shows security leaders their own blast radius before attackers do. Breach Map is available on Zero’s website, and will be demoed live on June 11^th during their upcoming webinar, “Mythos and Daybreak: What Boards Are Asking and What to Actually Do About It.”

“For seven years, we’ve engineered toward a single outcome: an attacker breaches a network protected by Zero, and discovers there’s nowhere left to go. In the AI era, that outcome isn’t aspirational, it’s essential,” said Benny Lakunishok, CEO and Co-Founder of Zero Networks. “Boards are demanding uptime and answers, and this data helps CISOs deliver. For the first time, risk leaders can benchmark their network security against the reality of hundreds of live enterprise environments and see precisely where they stand. But you cannot contain what you cannot see. That’s why we built Breach Map: to expose every open lateral movement path in your environment, so you can close it before an attacker walks through it.”

The data illustrates how far most enterprise networks leave the door open once attackers get inside.

Key Findings

The 2026 Lateral Movement Exposure Report identifies eleven lateral movement risks across enterprise environments. Key findings include:

• Roughly 80% of enterprises have already deployed internal AI agents, yet two-thirds lack governance policies for them – creating rapidly expanding unmanaged attack surfaces.
• 87% of enterprise servers accept inbound RDP or SSH connections from broad internal sources, giving attackers wide access pathways once inside the network.
• 78% of enterprise servers are reachable over SMB or WinRM, the same administrative protocols attackers commonly exploit for ransomware spread and lateral movement.
• 43% of internal authentication traffic still relies on NTLM, a legacy protocol frequently abused for credential replay and privilege escalation attacks.
• 12% of organizations maintain direct user-to-server administrative pathways, meaning a single compromised employee device can provide immediate access to high-value systems.
• The research shows most enterprise environments still allow breaches to spread too easily after initial compromise – a risk amplified significantly by AI-driven attack automation.

You can download the Zero Networks 2026 Lateral Movement Exposure report here →

“The industry spent years focused on keeping attackers out,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, Co-Founder of CrowdStrike and current President of Silverado Policy Accelerator. “But in the AI era, the biggest question facing defenders is what happens after they get in. This report shows most enterprises still have enormous internal blast radius, and that should concern every board, CIO, and CISO. The organizations that adapt fastest will shift from perimeter-only thinking to containment: limiting lateral movement, reducing blast radius and ensuring attacks cannot bring down a business.”

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