-: Transitive attacks.
Transitive attacks aren't really an actual type of attack
but more of a conceptual method.
It gets its name from the Transitive Property
we learned back in mathematics.
Essentially, the Transitive Property says
that if A equals B and B equals C,
then by all logic, A also equals C.
Now, when it comes to Security+,
and they talk about the idea of a transitive attack,
they're really focusing on the idea of trust.
If one network trusts a second network
and that second network trusts a third network,
then that first network really trusts the third network,
and so, if an attacker can get
into any one of those three networks,
he can then get into the other two, as well.
This is based on that transitive trust.
This is really important in the world of security
because whoever you trust,
you're also trusting everyone else
that they've ever trusted.
Whenever you connect your network to somebody else's network
using a trust relationship,
you're inherently assuming all of the risk
of their security posture
or the lack of their security posture,
in addition to your own security posture.
Now, often in large enterprise networks,
we reuse trust relationships
between different domain controllers
because this helps us minimize the amount of times
that someone has to authenticate
over and over for a resource,
but remember, whenever you sacrifice security
in order to afford yourself better or quicker operations,
there is a risk associated with it.
So, if your organization wishes
to maintain a strong security posture,
your systems should not assume trust
but instead, should question and re-question
every device and network that it wishes to connect to.