How I Rob Banks

Chapter 13Building My Own Office

When you have an office, people respect you. It can take years of grinding away in the corporate world to rise to the ranks where you are given an office. Sometimes in this job you have to take what you want; this is how I got my own office in an FTSE 100 company in just a few hours.

A client brought me in to test the security of their site: a site that was so large it had four distinct buildings, and each of those buildings was massive. The site had third-party security guards who roamed around like you see in the movies, always vigilant, and no one was sure if they were keeping people out or keeping people in. At least that was the image they portrayed and, no doubt, the image they projected in their sales pitch.

Once on the site, I was able to easily slip past the first reception area, and beyond that point security seemed to be rather lax. As in many of my assessments, I had agreed to perform multiple actions against the target. This is often due to time limits or if the client is feeling confident that I won't achieve the main goal. What normally happens is that I end up doing most, if not all, of the intended actions.

This job was one of those where I was easily able to accomplish all the tasks handed to me and still had hours of time paid for by the client. I like to give our clients as much value for money as possible, so I decided to continue finding my own things to do. In the end, it meant more writing for me, but I figured it might ...