What is a Zulu 5 Oscar?
A "Zulu 5 Oscar" is military slang for a Navy drill where someone tries to gain unauthorized access to a ship. In the security world, this is called a penetration test, or "pen test" for short. These drills illustrate weaknesses in a ship's security system, whcih can then be fixed to prevent anyone from doing it ever again.
The principle behind the penetration test is to illustrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that a security issue can be exploited to allow an attacker to gain access to their target, whether it be the bridge of a Navy ship or the database servers on a network. But the penetration test is often a tool of last resort for our group. We like to analyze problems without breaking anything.
About the group
Zulu 5 Oscar was set up in 2004 as a collaborative effor by a group of individuals to provide security consulting to website owners who felt that their sites were likely targets for being attacked. Of the 6 websites we initially provided consulting for, 2 were attacked within weeks of the consultation. Thanks to measures implemented as a result of our consultation, these websites experienced less than .01% downtime as a result of the attacks.
Zulu 5 Oscar now employs a number of security experts, trained in both physical and virtual security, who are available for corporate or consumer consulting. No job is too big, and no asset is too little.