Technique For Bypassing Every Alarm ... Except One

Imagine you’re leading a black team tasked with infiltrating a high-security facility. Your goal? To gain entry unnoticed, bypassing the layers of alarms and sensors that secure the building after hours. You've completed your reconnaissance and discovered an opportunity: You can easily walk into the building during the day while it’s open to the public or employees. However, your client has requested some tasks that will likely require you to be inside the building alone during the night to gain access to certain areas and accomplish certain tasks.

The ideal situation would be entering the building at night when it's empty, but then you'd have to navigate a minefield of motion detectors, door sensors, and alarms. So here is the question I will leave to you readers,

”Is it possible to be inside a high security facility, at night and only have to worry about, and disable a single sensor?”

I would encourage you to stop reading here and consider this question, and ask if it is possible, and if so, how would you do it?

Obviously in this post I will outline the solution, but it is still a good exercise.

Men vs. Machines: Choosing Your Battle

When planning a black team engagement, you face a fundamental choice: Do you battle the men or the machines? Breaking into a facility during the day means blending in with people and using social engineering to avoid detection. In essence, the humans are the sensors. You’ll need to navigate employees, security guards, and anyone else who might notice something out of place. Your challenge is to convince them, through appearance and behavior, that you belong—every human interaction becomes a potential point of failure.

On the other hand, breaking in at night means dealing with machines: alarms, motion sensors, cameras, and access controls. These systems are designed to be relentless and unyielding. Unlike humans, they don’t get tired or distracted. They operate on fixed rules—if you trigger a sensor, it will respond without hesitation.

But is there a way to break in at night without worrying about the machines? Obviously or I wouldn’t be writing this article, and it requires you to combine both a daytime and nighttime infiltration.

One of the biggest problems with daytime infiltration is that the longer you are present inside, the more people notice you and therefore the more chances someone may stop you especially if you are required to be inside restricted areas.

You will often find that you can move about pretty easily in the “low security” areas of a building, but once you enter the restricted areas (Directors offices, VIP board rooms, Sever & Archive rooms, etc) you may stand out like a sore thumb.

So if we can get inside a building, in its low security areas confidently, than lets combine that with a night time breach when there aren’t humans to stop you, and ideally no sensors or alarms either.

The Tactical Bathroom Method: Daytime Infiltration for Nighttime Advantage

The idea behind the tactical bathroom is simple: Get into the building during daylight hours while the facility is open and security measures are relaxed. The key is positioning yourself in an inconspicuous location—such as a bathroom—just before the building closes. Once there, you can wait until after hours when the building is empty, but unfortunately now alarms and sensors are on.

So before we even consider using the tactical bathroom, there are a few things that we must first discover during our recon: