County pays $600,000 to pentesters it arrested for assessing courthouse security
Two security professionals who were arrested in 2019 after performing an authorized security assessment of a county courthouse in Iowa will receive $600,000 to settle a lawsuit they brought alleging wrongful arrest and defamation.
The case was brought by Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn, two penetration testers who at the time were employed by Colorado-based security firm Coalfire Labs. The men had written authorization from the Iowa Judicial Branch to conduct “red-team” exercises, meaning attempted security breaches that mimic techniques used by criminal hackers or burglars.
The objective of such exercises is to test the resilience of existing defenses using the types of real-world attacks the defenses are designed to repel. The rules of engagement for this exercise explicitly permitted “physical attacks,” including “lockpicking,” against judicial branch buildings so long as they didn’t cause significant damage.