GRAPH-BASED DETECTION OF LATERAL MOVEMENT

A lateral movement application identifies lateral movement (LM) candidates that potentially represent a security threat. Security platforms generate event data when performing security-related functions, such as authenticating a user account. The disclosed technology enables greatly increased accuracy identification of lateral movement (LM) candidates by, for example, refining a population of LM candidates based on an analysis of a time constrained graph in which nodes represent entities, and edges between nodes represent a time sequence of login or other association activities between the entities. The graph is created based on an analysis of the event data, including time sequences of the event data.