Author: Bjørn Madsen

Read this post and it will save you a service call from a locksmith.  Consult yourself for the best way to improve security in your home or office.  I sell locks to increase your security, but I will level with you: they are not the whole part of the story.  Criminals and most people in general are like water: they typically take the path of least resistance.  If you have an amazing $400 Mul-T-Lock deadbolt, they will go through the window.  They may also go around the house and kick the basement door in.  They won’t stand around picking your locks.

Therefore, when budgeting for a security increase, look at the whole picture.  Do you have a balcony with an open door or window near a tree?  Do you have large windows near your door that criminals could simply walk through?  Are your doors hollow-core, thin, and lightweight?

There is a saying that locks only keep honest people out.  I would like to amend it by also saying they keep lazy criminals out.  You can work to keep slightly less lazy criminals out of your house by making sure you have a good door, and a good door frame, for your lock(s) to work in concert with.

If you have windows in or near your door that allow a criminal to reach the thumbturn of your deadbolt, you should consider buying a double-sided deadbolt or get rid of the windows.

If you are concerned about people kicking your door down, consider getting a metal or heavy wooden door that opens out with concealed hinges.  To prevent bumpkeying or bumping your locks, consider hiring a locksmith to add heavy-duty springs to your locks.  Ensure that your doors are well-lit and that all doors have the same level of security.  It does little good to install expensive security if your neglected basement door is hollow-core and has a cheap “defiant” lock from home depot on it, and is in a dark stairway.  This is ideal for thieves to pry open without direct line of sight from neighbouring houses.

A final warning concerning overall security of your home: where are your keys?  Criminals know where people usually hide their keys and will check flower pots and door mats near the door.  They will also obtain keys from lowlives that work in concert with them, perhaps changing your carpet or installing a new garage door opener.  If you gave them a key, consider that key in the hands of the public.  To prevent them coming back with that key, whenever I rekey somebody’s house i recommend that they leave one doorknob in the back of the house keyed differently than the rest of the house.  Then, if you leave the deadbolt unengaged, workers can enter using the doorknob at pre-arranged times.  When they are done, simply use the deadbolt.  They or their friend cannot get in by simply unlocking the doorknob.  They will have to either kick in the door (difficult with a well-installed deadbolt with long screws reaching the stud in the wall), pick the lock (most criminals are not this savvy) or bump the lock.

Another possibility for this scenario is to have one lock be an LFIC lock, which means that you can easily change out the cylinder to allow temporary access with a different key.  When you want to disallow access with that guest key, change back to your home cylinder.

We can discuss these possibilities over the phone at no charge.  Or, if I have piqued your interest we can do a walkthrough of your home and discuss the best way to increase your security and therefore your peace of mind.

Anybody can open a car in under a minute if they have a few tools and practice.  It will usually set off a car alarm.  However, criminals who are really smart or have really smart bosses can also quickly and easily unlock your car and disable the car alarm.  If your car uses the keeloq or pkes systems, someone can copy your wireless transponder signature and unlock your car remotely just like you do.

You’ve already heard it but it bears repeating: don’t leave valuables in your car!  Especially not in view of windows.  It would be terrible if somebody smashed your window with a concrete block to steal $5 to fund their drug habit.  You have to pay hundreds of dollars to fix it, and you will NEVER get all the broken glass out of your car!

Why would I link the papers above?  A lot of the locksmithing and security world practices “security through obscurity”.  They like to put their heads in the sand and hope that criminals don’t learn their tricks, but with the internet criminals will find out and they will do it really fast.  Therefore, vulnerabilities must be published and talked about in order to allow people who own property protected by vulnerable security to fix it, and also maybe to shame manufacturers using shoddy security models to update them.

We all knew it was only a matter of time before software hackers eventually turned to the comparatively low-hanging fruit of automotive security.  The people who are consistently hacking ssl have turned their sights on the radio signals that allow one to open a car, and they have succeeded according to film footage in this article.

In the footage, people walk up with some kind of wireless key fob and open every vehicle of certain makes they point it at and steal lots of stuff without setting off any car alarm.  Car manufacturers appear to be stumped, as do security experts.  If there is a way to do this, the criminals that developed it aren’t sharing and they didn’t get it from some place like hackaday where exploits are discussed.

This is hard because the wireless key fobs use rolling codes to unlock the door which means that the thieves must circumvent the rolling codes or they must somehow record all of them.  You cannot brute force these because I believe the rolling code cars will stop listening if you do.

The current thought on how this is accomplished is either a taser or a bug zapper or something putting out a big spike of electricity to act on the solenoid in the car’s door that operates the lock.  Time will tell.  Until then, don’t leave anything valuable in your car!

I have seen this happen numerous times.  The solution is always that the linkage has come out of the back of the lock cylinder.  The idea is that when you turn the key, it moves a long wire inside the door and this is connected to the unlock sensor.  If the wire falls out, somebody or something has to put it back in (duh duh duh DUH!)

A warning: If you try to put it back in, you will possibly scratch or crack the plastic panel of your door.  Most cars require that you unscrew lots of screws and then pry off the plastic to get inside the door.  Then there is the possibility of deploying an airbag in the door.  Taking a door off can be a minefield.  You can get a plastic tool from auto part stores for (more) safely removing plastic parts, and if you don’t do anything stupid you probably won’t trigger the airbag.

Once you have the plastic off, just look at the back of the lock.  If there is plastic in the way, it is easy to peel back.  It is glued down and if you are careful about how you peel it up  you can put it back the same way with no tears.  I hope you have the window rolled up!  The lock is probably to the side of the window anyway.  If you have a problem rolling your window up, while you have the panel off you could replace the motor for your window.  Back to the lock.  If the linkage has fallen out, look at the back of the lock and see the connector that hopefully is on the back.  Then look around below the lock for a loose wire that seems out of place.  If you find one, does it connect back to the lock in some obvious way?  Don’t just stick it back on there or it might just fall out again.

I recommend using some 200 mph tape, known to residents of the lower 48 as “duct tape”.  It won’t degrade with hot and cold weather cycles like other fixes I have seen (rubber bands?  Please!)

Of course, check to see if it works once you have reconnected it.  Usually this entails sticking a wire into a plastic wire holder and then wiring it in there or taping it in.  Then stick your key in and turn.  You should be rewarded with the sound of your lock(s) unlocking, assuming your battery is good and you have that type of car.  Otherwise, your reward may take some different but familiar form like the normal sound of your car unlocking.  Whatever.  If it works, it is time to reattach the plastic fabric that is used to keep the inside of your door moisture free.  Make sure that there are no tears.  If there are, you are going to want to tape those shut.  Make sure you don’t leave any tools in there.  Make sure that everything works right including the windows, and that your door will shut and open properly.

Now it is time to reattach the plastic cover for the door again.  You will probably have to reattach some electric connections if you have electric locks and windows, maybe some speaker wires.  Then snap it back on without cracking brittle plastic snap connectors.  The Russians I bought my car from snapped off at least one connector for every plastic part of my car I think, and also some metal ones!

That said, you don’t need every plastic connector.  The screws will hold the door on well enough.  You can probably buy some of these plastic snap connectors from an auto parts store or fleabay.  I never bothered to repair these and just live with the car I bought from the Russians, who wired the plastic panels back on when they broke all the tabs off.

I am not sure how they did it either because it is actually really hard to cut the wires.
They must have wired the dash panel on from the firewall or something because I can barely pry the panel back enough just to nip the wires off!  Russian ingenuity, I will never know.  They beat us to space somehow, no doubt using similar technologies.

I just bought a big packet of spool drivers which are useful for enhancing the security of locks.  Most locksmiths don’t want to deal with pcking these because picking them is hard , so they drill them, but I am loathe to drill a lock without necessity.  I bought a packet of spool drivers for practice and to put in my own locks.  I can put them in your locks just as easily.  Why not have your locks rekeyed and, for a very nominal fee, have one spool driver added?

The spool driver doesn’t make your lock pick or bumpkey-proof, but it will make it harder to use these techniques on your lock.  It will buy time, something that a potential intruder doesn’t usually have.  They want in your house fast so nobody sees them.  They don’t want to stand around picking your lock for 15 minutes while people drive by and the neighbor’s dog barks at them while being walked.  They don’t want to stand around hammering a bumpkey for ten minutes at 1 in the morning, because people will notice.  That is the difference this one little pin makes: where a lock would only take 1 minute to pick, a spool driver increases that time three to five-fold.

So have your lock serviced.  I will replace a few of the drivers in your lock with spool drivers, replace the springs, and change the bottom pins to pair with different keys all in one for nearly the cost of simply changing the bottom pins, or rekeying.  It will add years of life to your lock as well as add layers of security to it.

Yesterday I responded to an emergency lockout at a restaurant.  Presumably a disgruntled former employee had shoved pieces of wood into the keyway of both locks allowing entrance to the restaurant, and the morning crew had unknowingly stuck their keys in to open the restaurant only to shove the alien materials farther into the lock.

I was able to remove these unwanted items from the lock quickly using special tools called key extractors, but most people would be hard-pressed to do this without owning the same tools and knowledge of how to use them.  The way around this problem?  Keyless entry!

Keyless entry is the most exciting possibility for restaurant and other business owners.  Why?  Because it allows you to give each employee a code to type in to enter the building.  On some models, you can see an access log and align it with other data, such as when the safe was stolen or when the business was ransacked/defaced.  On the same models and cheaper models, you can delete the entrance code when an employee becomes a former employee.  This means that you can control access to your business without having to pay me to rekey it every time somebody with a key is terminated.  And I do mean that you can control access.  The instructions that come with keyless entry locks are usually about three pages and are understandable by mortals without a background in locksmithing.

Finally, you may say to yourself, “Yes, yes, this sounds all fine and dandy, but what if somebody just takes a baseball bat to this lock and beats it to a pulp?”  To which I answer, your business is probably located somewhere with night security or at least people within earshot.  In the big city, people can’t go around beating on doors or sawing through them with reciprocating saws without attracting attention.  Furthermore, they could use these tools now against your business.  For that matter, they could take a jackhammer and go through your ceiling.  What keyless entry does provide is a great way to control entry access to your business with the ability to immediately adjust it for free, without the restriction of keyways that can be filled with bark or even worse, glue.

Give me a call and we’ll talk about the costs and timeframe of getting one of these on your door.