Comment by kafrofrite

Most providers had a semi-automated process that granted you permission to conduct your pentest (assuming you'd share any findings reg. their infra with them). In reality though, most of the findings didn't come from poking around but from tapping the wire. I'd spin up VMs and tcpdump for hours, then look at the logs for odd packets, plaintext etc. etc. which makes it hard to detect such shenanigans

Edit: We went through the process for everything, including having a provider ship us a back-up solution to pentest. My desk became everyone's favourite place in the building :P