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Combination keysafes revisited

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

Followers of this blog will probably recall our whitepaper on combination padlocks, and the mention of the mechanical keysafes available, especially the poor security of some of them.

Today I received another keysafe. This unit is branded Asec, and also some are branded Burton. At first glance, it looks like the high security Supra keysafe unit, but with a rounded base. Retailing for about half the price, this unit is clearly a direct copy, but made in China rather than the USA. The code setting is nearly the same, the code entry, opening and reset are the same, as is the rubber weather cover design. Even the mounting holes are exactly the same, barring one additional one.

All they left out was the security!

This cheap Chinese copy can be opened without a trace in seconds, with barely any practise. It is, almost unbelievably, easier to open than the Sterling keysafe, itself an insecure joke. And, should someone be inept enough to be unable to open it, they can fairly easily prise it from the wall, due to the 2 rawlplug fixings.

Please, save yourself a fortune in insurance rises and/or the nightmare of an insurance non-payout, and don’t buy this cheap copy keysafe.

Discreet Security *only* recommend and install the genuine Supra/GE keysafe range seen at http://www.keysafe.co.uk/ . Don’t be a fool.

Posted in Cheers & Jeers, Jobs, tips | No Comments »

Who says burglars don’t pick or bump locks?

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

Here’s a report I found online, reporting on a 2-man crimewave using bumpkeys. Lasting over several years, the police had a very good idea who was behind it, and despite traiing them for 2 years theey never got them red-handed. However, when police eventually went to one of their houses, they found it packed with stolen goods! Bumping criminals caught in USA

Closer to home, I went last week to a church who had been targeted. The big old and impressive lock on the vestry door had been opened, and my investigation revealed it was picked with wires. A few hundred pounds in cash was taken. Hardly worth it – robbing a church? If there is a god, and a hell, then those criminals will really regret that choice!

We hope to prevent the need for divine retribution, though. The new security system, carefully designed and chosen to be in keeping with the very old and beautiful wood and stone, should keep anyone unauthorised out for a very long time.

Posted in Cheers & Jeers, Commentary, Crime, Jobs | No Comments »

The hazards of living in the countryside

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Here’s an interesting job. Called to open a door in the countryside south of Tenbury Wells, with lost keys. I tried picking it, and nothing. No movement, nothing’s working. I finally get the door open without damage, open the lock case, and see this.

Packed full of... stuff

Packed full of... stuff

A family of wasps had built a home inside it, out of clay!

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Heavy duty doors require heavy duty hardware

Saturday, August 1st, 2009

A recent job took rather longer than might be expected from the task – “Fit a door closer”. However, due to careful pre-planning and two site visits, the actual installation went well.

The door that required a closer mechanism, to firmly lock the door for security, but also to reduce the thunderous impact of the extremely heavy, 300+ year old oak, was also rather large. Drilling the fixing holes was a careful and long operation, with drill bit clearance required every few centimetres, and lifting the door to work on the hinges required a jack more often used for off-road vehicles!

The selected high quality LCN door closers are used in top end applications due to the high resistance to wear, good duty cycle, longevity and leak resistance (a feature often overlooked on cheaper hydraulic closers) as well as the obvious need for firm and controlled latching.

Work is not quite yet finished, however. The wear showing on the hinges has dropped the door a few critical millimetres over many, many years, and so the hinges will have to be shimmed with specially made washers. Sadly, typical off-the-shelf hinge packers are rather smaller than the 32mm O.D., 22mm I.D. required, so some lathe time is still required.

Even without these additions, however, the door still closes perfectly, regardless of opening angle, while the backcheck feature prevents the door or wall of this Grade 1 listed building being damaged.

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So you want to be a locksmith?

Friday, June 12th, 2009

If it was as easy as pay a few hundred pounds, take a short training course and earn more money than a doctor, then doctors would be doing [locksmithing]! 1

Martin Pink, Rapid Locksmiths, Nottingham

The state of the locksmith industry is a poor one. Training houses are churning out hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new “locksmiths” every week. There are now estimated to be over 100 locksmith trainers in the UK 2, so you have to wonder where all those locksmiths are setting up, and where the mythical £1000+ a week is meant to be coming from.

If you are redundant, or leaving the forces, don’t bother becoming a locksmith. Even the best are struggling, and the phone books are full of those advertising for the small section of the market that is lock-out work.

Even if you are the best, will you afford the pages of advertising bought by the national franchises, who churn through half-trained locksmiths, paying them the few pounds they desperately need, before they go bust, whilst feathering their nests?

Or to compete against these same desperate folks when they offer to do a job cutting out the national for £5 over cost? Perhaps most tricky, is will you have the balls of steel required to stand there and tell a customer that the job you quoted at £40 will now be £250 because it was hard, or because you broke their lock, or because you have them over a barrel, because it is dark and cold and wet,  or because you have to make the mortgage payment – and this was your only job this week?? – because you only did 15 hours of training before setting up?

Do some research before you start up, and you will find that (if you are in the UK) there are already many well-established outfits struggling, and time-served locksmiths leaving the profession to make more money as plumbers and joiners.

There are also plenty who did a two day course, failed to get even one job from it, and then… set themselves up as trainers! You can imagine the quality of the course, cadged from an already short course, then regurgitated to those who know no better. It’s one way of making the course pay for itself. Often, it’s the only way.

Be careful out there.

(And the same goes for those needing a locksmith as wanting to be a locksmith!)

1 – http://www.keyzine.co.uk/OnlineNews/May09-1/8PagesTraining.pdf
2 – A look at Google’s adverts reveals 12 companies paying for you just to click their advert as at 12th June 2009. The actual search results contain dozens more.

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White paper: A guide to the manipulation of various combination locks

Monday, March 16th, 2009

There have been many people who have reviewed and tested safe combination locks, including large organisations such as Underwriters Labatory and the British Standards Institute. It is the same with door locks, and insurance grade keyed padlocks. However, when I was recently asked to provide a secure combination lock for a set of factory gates, there was nowhere to turn to.

After buying and testing several combination padlocks, I decided to publish my notes, and at that point, I decided that it would be worth testing some of the lower end locks too.

If you use any of the locks given a poor score, you should probably think about upgrading them if your security is important to you. The advice for opening them is limited to very basic manipulation, the kind of thing that most people could work out in a few minutes if they were so inclined. No fancy tools are needed.

I am releasing the paper as “linkware” – you may have a personal or business copy, in exchange for a link back to here. If you are a locksmith, and would be interested in a full copy of this paper, please leave a comment with your website details, and, please link to this site. I will verify it and send you a full copy of the paper to your registered email address, which contains the manipulation process for each of the locks featured. Feedback, as ever, is welcome.

combo-padlock-white-paper-public

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Pickbuster authorised agent for Birmingham and the West Midlands

Friday, January 30th, 2009

Discreet Security has just signed up as the linked provider of the Pickbuster anti-bumping solution.

You can view our new microsite on the Pickbuster website to verify this: http://www.pickbuster.co.uk/Discreet Security

Pickbuster is a relatively simple and low cost solution to the problems presented by lock bumping. Lock bumping has been known for nearly 100 years in the close-knit locksmithing community, but with the growth of sites allowing user content to be easily added, this cat has truely gotten out the bag.  Google returns plenty of results, and a few videos, including mainstream news reports such as this one from the USA.

So, which locks are at risk? In the UK, every single white plastic uPVC door you see is a target, and over 99% of them are vulnerable. A few aren’t, because they are either broken, have unusually high security locks (as even most high security locks are easily beaten with this technique) or they have been treated with Pickbuster already. Perhaps more worryingly still, one “universal” bumpkey freely available online for a few pounds will open about 95% of all of these doors!

Wooden doors aren’t quite so vulnerable, as long as you are locking the mortice lock when going out, and dropping the snib when inside. Lever locks can be bumped, sort of, but it is a technique that has been de-fanged for any modern lever lock with a security rating. They are also far stronger than the latch alone, so do remember to turn that key on your way out!

If you are worried, and would like some free advice, have a read around this site, have a look online (that Google link above is a good start, as is the Pickbuster website) and feel free to leave a question in the comments or send us an email. Remember, we can treat your locks fairly quickly, and stop this threat, and also take a look at your properties security to see what other, often small, changes would enhance your security.

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Posted in Commentary, Crime, Jobs, on-line | No Comments »

Happy New Year

Monday, January 5th, 2009

Happy New Year, to both my readers! /me waves to googlebot.

Trying to go to a job this morning, it took me 15 minutes to get up the drive. I was on the verge of giving up, and it was only a quarter inch of snow. However, good driving prevailed, and I even managed to not crash into the courier who was coming the other way on the lane. I did worry a bit as his van stopped alongside mine and started to slide sideways, though. Fortunately, he stopped a nice safe distance away, there was at least another 20mm before he’d have hit the wingmirror!

Take care out there.

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Wired Keyboard keystroke sniffing

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

It is quite old news that you can pick up the keystrokes from a target PC with a USB dongle, a PS/2 connector, or a bit of keystroke logging software, and it is also a few years since the majority of wireless keyboards were decrypted, meaning that it became trivial to eavesdrop on what a person was writing onscreen by looking at the radio transmissions from the keyboard. There is also a technique called “TEMPEST analysis” which records and displays what you see on your screen onto another PC.

Tempest is a sly reference to the storm of different electromagnetic (EM) radiation that comes out of a typical computer system. You see, every time an electron moves, there is an electric and magnetic feild that results. For a room temperature metal object, there is radio emmission in the millimetre range. (This is now being used for “see through your clothes” imaging cameras. I’ll post about that another day.) Warm things give off infra-red radiation. Very warm things glow.

Beyond that, to move the electrons around your PC and send signals, the electrons move back and forth, and give off some EM radio waves. These are longer wavelength, and travel through walls and air just fine, though they are very weak. The wires on your keyboard act just great as an aerial, so some people have been working on methods for reading these signals.

The videos below show this being done.

    Compromising Electromagnetic Emanations of Keyboards Experiment 1/2 from Martin Vuagnoux on Vimeo.

    Compromising Electromagnetic Emanations of Keyboards Experiment 2/2 from Martin Vuagnoux on Vimeo.

This isn’t something the “average person” should worry about, is what you normally hear when something like this is revealed, but who among us is average? As to the answer, well, currently there doesn’t seem to be one. Fortunately the range is short, so keep an eye out for people pointing satellite dishes at your house, and you should be fine. The other option is to make it a little harder for anyone trying. Buy a good keyboard, with a shielded cable, and make sure your PC case is done up properly. This will reduce the EM that is able to escape, and so make reading it even harder.

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National Trust preferred supplier locksmiths

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

We are happy to report that Discreet Security are now the preferred locksmiths for the National Trust for our local area. So far I have only visited the lovely Croft Castle. If you are in the area, it is worth a look around.

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