this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Besides the obvious nefarious purposes, a pen test is something legit I can think of that would be useful for.
Why do you need the device to be unnoticeable for that?
You can’t see how being less detectable might be in your favor for a pen test?
It's not spy work, it's testing a system.
Part of modern pen testing absolutely involves a bit of social engineering to test policy enforcement
There can be a physical component to it though I’m not too sure about how prevalent it is. Which would be aided by blending in.
Is pen testing a visual test now?
How does the physical appearance of the device affect its electronic penetration?
Yes? Pen testing is often “I am hiring you to see how far you can get into the company infrastructure under these constraints.” This includes human interaction, and humans can be a barrier to a pen test.
Part of that is going to be looking as innocuous as possible. Though admittedly that isn’t always the case. This kinda gets blown away when someone goes “oh look, that’s a flipper zero, aren’t those used for hacking?”
Interesting. It sounded kind of ridiculous to me, I guess I didn't consider gaining access to a building or something.
Ah okay, I see the confusion. A lot of people think pen testing is just “try to break into our app” or “try to get into our network” but those are usually narrow scope pen testing.
If you truly want to test your security, you can never rule out physical access. You could have the most secure network in the world and it would mean nothing if you kept it in an unlocked room in a publicly accessible area.
And you’d be surprised by the number of times pen testers gain access to those rooms because of human mistakes.