Commercial Physical Penetration Tests are beneficial to companies and organisations to highlight true physical, procedural or technical vulnerability and are especially useful in the maintenance of particularly valuable assets, or information.

We maintain the original idea of the Tiger Test (Tiger Testing is a special type of vulnerability test that originated in the United States Air Force who use it to test air base defences. The personnel who perform such testing are referred to as the Tiger Team). We apply this idea specifically to ‘Information and Assets’. Once a Client has specified which information or assets are ‘Target Assets’ (TAs), we use whatever non-violent means that would be reasonably available to a covert agent to try and acquire that Target Asset. Our experts backgrounds means that they are particularly well suited to perform specialist Tiger Testing.

Black Swan has deployed many physical penetration teams to evaluate and test a company or organisations security arrangements.

Many companies do an excellent job of testing the security, and insuring the integrity of their customer and consumer privacy. Nevertheless, customer and consumer privacy is better protected by external testing than internal testing because:

Greater Expertise - External testing firms, such as Tiger Testing, fund on-going R&D, systems development, and operations to maintain and run state-of-the-art security testing tools and techniques. A financial firm could not justify the effort to develop and maintain such expertise for internal testing.

Cost Effective – Financial firm’s security staffs have a limited amount of time and a limited budget to devote to testing. Financial firms that use an external system security tester can devote a greater amount of their internal system security team’s time to closing and preventing security gaps to safeguard customer privacy. It would not be cost effective for financial firms to fund such an effort for internal testing alone.

Lack of Corporate Bias – External testers would be more objective than internal testers because external testers would not be biased by a financial firm’s: previous system security decisions, current system environment, or future system security plans.

Full Reporting – Employees of financial firms may be reluctant to disclose security gaps because they may believe that: presenting any bad news may be bad for their career, the gaps might have been caused by them, and/or the gaps might have been caused by their friends. Conversely, career advancement and professional recognition at external testing firms such as Tiger Testing are dependent upon identifying security gaps.

Independent Security Testing (including Penetration Testing) To Insure Privacy Customer and consumer privacy is best protected by independent testers that do not have any conflicts of interest:

• Independence assures unbiased and complete test results.
• Firms that sell: auditing, consulting, software, hardware, firewalls, hosting, or networking services or products have conflicts of interest.

In order to best safeguard consumer privacy, system security should be tested by independent security testers with no conflicts of interest.

Who are Black Swan Security?

Black Swan Security is a London based privately owned, British security, risk and data Management Company. We have experience with a world-wide client-base, including governments, international agencies and the international corporate sector. We offer comprehensive advice on every aspect of security – from data protection to physical corporate operations, commercial risk and foreign investment to counter-terrorism and close protection.

At Black Swan we provide integrated security advice (combining information, personnel and physical) to businesses and organisations both nationally and internationally. Through the delivery of this advice, we protect business infrastructure and security integrity by helping to reduce the vulnerability of your company infrastructure to terrorism and other threats

The ability to anticipate and effectively manage potential threats is a key part of the business planning process. When a crisis arises, knowing how to react and respond is critical as it can result in either success or failure and ultimately determine whether or not your business is able to survive and prosper

For more information on the benefits and procedures involved in physical penetration testing please contact us.