How a Hacker's Mom Broke Into a South Dakota Prison

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275:

How a Hacker's Mom Broke Into a South Dakota Prison:

John Strand breaks into things for a living. As a penetration tester, he gets hired by organizations to attack their defenses, helping reveal weaknesses before actual bad guys find them. Normally, Strand embarks on these missions himself, or deploys one of his experienced colleagues at Black Hills Information Security. But in July 2014, prepping for a pen test of a South Dakota correctional facility, he took a decidedly different tack. He sent his mom.

[...] "She approached me one day, and said 'You know, I want to break in somewhere," says Strand, who is sharing the experience this week at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco. "And it's my mom, so what am I supposed to say?"

That's not as easy a call as it might sound. Penetration testers always say that you can get amazingly far with just a clipboard and some confidence, but a novice run at a state correctional facility is just plain daunting. And while pen testers are contractually permitted to break into a client's systems, if they're caught tensions can escalate quickly.

[...] Rita Strand's mission would also be complicated by her lack of technical expertise. A professional pen tester would be able to assess an organization's digital security in real time and plant back doors tailored to what they found on the specific network. Rita had the health inspector guise down cold, but she was no hacker.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.