What is a Physical Penetration Test?
Physical security is just as important as cyber security, and by ignoring the former, you undermine the latter. If the servers holding critical business information are not physically secure, neither is the data contained within them. Not every bad actor is glued to his or her screen. Sometimes these highly motivated individuals will try to breach your physical security to achieve their goals.
A Physical Penetration Test — also known as a 'black team' engagement — will reveal real-world opportunities for malicious insiders or bad actors to be able to compromise physical barriers, such as locks, sensors, security cameras and tripwires, in such a way that allows for unauthorised physical access to sensitive areas leading up to data breaches and system or network compromise.
- Physical security can easily be compromised allowing theft of information, access to physical plant systems, installation of malicious software and more
- By showing an expired ID badge to a security guard, a former employee gained access to a secure data backup facility and unplugged the CCTV cameras before stealing backups with personal records for 80,000 employees.
- A contract programmer tricked a janitor into unlocking another employee's office after hours by switching the nameplates on the door and asking to be let into “his” office. With access to the colleague's workstation, he was able to download sensitive source code onto removable media and take it with him to a competitor.
Why Choose Aurian?
A physical penetration test can be conducted with or without a cyber security penetration test, if they are in conjunction then the physical component will involve the operators planting various devices such as keyloggers and backdoored USB sticks inside the building.
Our Physical Penetration Test provides benefits including:
- Understanding weaknesses and vulnerabilities in your physical security controls, such as locks, cameras and barriers
- Following the attack path that a real attacker might take in your environment, and what information they can compromise following your physical security
- Determining the likelihood of a physical security compromise
- An understanding of how your employees' actions may inadvertently lead to the exposure of sensitive data
- Delivering a series of detailed recommendations discussing the implication of any inadequate security controls, and how to better identify physical security attacks in future