The author is a well-known (on the twitter-sphere) pen-tester. Despite the childish gif memes and dramatic trimming, I don't think he made it up. But I agree,

The author is a well-known (on the twitter-sphere) pen-tester. Despite the childish gif memes and dramatic trimming, I don't think he made it up. But I agree, it seems strange that he didn't succeed. When corporations hire pen-testers, the set-up is that their CIO/CSO has full knowledge of what is going down and when so that they're prepared to intervene in the unlikely scenario of the pen-tester getting caught. Knowing the mentality that is common amongst c-level suits, however, it would not be surprising if the suit tipped-off his IT guy in advance. After all, wouldn't catching the well-paid pen-tester look better to the other suits than being utterly pwned and paying for privilege? The CIO might have successfully "kobiashi-maru'd" the whole exercise. Not saying that happened here, but if large corporations are capable of horrific security breaches, I think they're also capable of trying game the system to avoid things going sideways.