Although penetration testing might be viewed as one of the more glamorous jobs in cybersecurity – think of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible hacking into a CIA computer while dangling horizontally from cables in a heavily protected room – it might come as a surprise to learn that one of the challenges of the profession is fighting “boredom.”
“It sounds awesome, right? You get this view of Tom Cruise being [lowered] into a computer room, but in reality it’s the same tools, techniques, procedures done repeatedly over and over again. You’ll get a lot of the same findings,” says David Maynor, a security consultant who has been conducting penetration tests for more than 15 years.