Physical penetration testing can help prevent costly security breaches

Penetration testing can play a vital role for an organization’ security, especially in the current climate of business insecurity, where every conceivable precaution has to be taken in order to enable businesses to protect themselves and their assets from risk and breach.

Even an innocuous theft or minor breach of security can quickly escalate into something far more sinister and damaging. That’s why it is crucial that all business put in place resilient and reliable security systems. These systems should guard against attacks to personal, physical and information security. But how can businesses be sure that their security systems are effective and robust?

This can be achieved by using the services of a penetration testing specialist (such as our partners, DPH Security Consultancy) to conduct an in-depth and comprehensive physical pen test. The primary objective for a physical penetration test is to measure the strength of existing physical security controls and uncover their weaknesses before bad actors are able to discover and exploit them.

Physical penetration testing, or physical intrusion testing, will reveal real-world opportunities for malicious insiders or ‘bad actors’ to be able to compromise physical barriers (ie: locks, sensors, cameras, mantraps) in such a way that allows for unauthorised physical access to sensitive areas leading up to data breaches and system/network compromise.

Typical physical penetration tests are carried out as attack simulations, with the main purpose of the testers (often former members of special forces units, the military, police forces, etc.) being to:

• Identify physical security control flaws present in the environment
• Understand the level of real-world risk for an organisation
• Help address and fix identified physical security flaws

Security physical penetration testers have experience in infiltrating some of the most secure environments the same way unwanted visitors would. They leverage this experience to home in on critical issues and provide actionable remediation guidance.

In order to perform a comprehensive real-world assessment, specialists will utilise commercial tools, internally developed tools and the same tools ‘bad actors’ might use on each and every assessment. Once again, the intent is to assess systems by simulating a real-world attack and leverage the many tools at our disposal to effectively carry out that task.

The end result of a comprehensive physical penetration test is a detailed report that helps plug any security gaps the testers might have encountered, thereby significantly reducing the risk of a security breach for the organization.