Walk around most modern offices today and you will find a surprising number of smart devices quietly connected to the network that nobody in IT ever formally approved, or even fully remembers exists on the estate at all. A smart TV mounted in the boardroom. A networked printer nobody has updated in several years. A building access control system installed originally by a facilities contractor who has long since moved on to other clients entirely and taken the documentation with them out of the door.
Convenience arrives faster than oversight
These devices get added for entirely sensible reasons at the time, usually plain convenience, and they rarely go through the same procurement and security review that a new laptop or server would automatically trigger as a matter of settled policy. A facilities team buys a smart thermostat for the office. A department orders a video conferencing unit for its own meeting room. Each individual purchase feels minor and self-contained in isolation, and collectively they add up over time to a substantial, largely unmanaged slice of your actual network footprint that nobody has fully mapped.
A proper internal network pen testing specifically looks for these exact devices, because they frequently run outdated firmware, use default credentials nobody ever thought to change during initial setup, and sit on the same network segment as far more sensitive systems without any deliberate decision behind that arrangement at all. Testers actively hunt for this entire category of device precisely because it gets missed so consistently by conventional asset inventories built primarily around laptops and servers.
Small device, meaningful foothold
An attacker rarely cares about your smart TV for its own sake at all. They care about it purely as a stepping stone, a device with weak security that happens to sit on the same network as the finance server, the customer database, or the domain controller managing every login across the entire business. Compromise the easy target first, then pivot quietly and methodically to the target that actually matters, using the smart device purely as a convenient foothold along the way.
William Fieldhouse has used exactly this kind of device as an entry point during live testing before.
“We got into a client’s network through a networked printer still running its factory default password, something nobody had thought about in years because nobody really thinks of a printer as a genuine security risk. From there we reached their file servers within the hour, with no further resistance encountered anywhere along the way.”
— William Fieldhouse, Director of Aardwolf Security Ltd
That printer was never the actual target, and it never really needed to be one either. It was simply the easiest way in, sitting quietly on the same flat network as everything genuinely worth protecting, with nobody having ever made a deliberate decision to separate it properly from more sensitive systems in the first place, years earlier.
Bring the whole network into view
Every connected device deserves a proper place in your asset inventory and your security testing scope, not just the laptops and servers that come to mind first when the exercise begins. Combining thorough Wifi pen Testing with a full internal review brings these overlooked devices into clear view before an attacker finds them first and puts them to considerably worse use than simply printing meeting agendas.
