I think that’s covered in the paperclip game:
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There are a lot of safes that can be breached with a little time and long pry bar. Leverage is a bitch.
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Many are, however, designed to give the false appearance of being security safes. This Sentry safe is a fire safe, but has massive 1" diameter locking bolts to make it look like it is secure, when in fact the bolts are the most over engineered part of the safe - they seat into plastic sockets, and the anchor on the other side of the door is a small plastic wedge. There is no legitimate engineering reason to have 4 1" locking bolts in a small fire safe that is made of plastic, fire insulation and a thin sheet metal outer covering. The shear force required to break a few 1/4" bolts would be more than sufficient to exceed the strength of the rest of the safe’s components.
So, it isn’t a stupid mistake on the public’s part to believe that fire safes are security safes, it is a deliberate mis-representation by some fire safe manufacturers, intended from the design phase of the safes and continued through the marketing. The giant bolts and thick door speak visually louder than the verbal disclaimers that it is a fire safe.
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I love lockpicking / safe-cracking stuff, and that video led me down a wonderful rabbit-hole where I found this fascinating site:
www.lockpickingforensics.com/
I blame computer games and RPGs for getting me interested in lock-picking. I even picked up some practice locks and picks a few years ago and taught myself to pick. It unexpectedly came in useful one night when I came home to find my neighbour locked out of their flat. Rather than bother the landlord (who was a bit of a dick and threatened to charge an inordinate amount of money if you had to call him out to let you in), I whipped out my picks and had them inside in under 5 minutes, whereupon they discovered they’d left their keys on the bed.
I was dead chuffed!
Mind you, having read Bill Mason’s brilliant autobiography “Nine Lives”, along with Geoff Manaugh’s “A Burglar’s Guide to the City”, I realised that if someone wants to get in to your property badly enough, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be picking your locks.
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No, there isn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised though if the same door is used in other models of strongboxes by the same (or other) manufacturer(s) that are a bit, well, safer.
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Maybe, but I don’t think the bolts are even solid. I think they may be hollow since their oversized OD is security theater anyway and it wouldn’t make sense to spend a lot of money on making them out of solid steel barstock for security theater when that could be more profit for Sentry. Even being hollow they would still be massively over engineered compared to the rest of the safe’s components.
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Well… shit.
It’s very adversarial when it comes to security (obviously so). But i mean that in the sense of, if someone has enough motivation they will likely defeat whatever security you have in place. The best anyone can do is make it such a hassle that it’s not worth the effort, time, and risk.
Thankfully i’ve never experienced a break in but i know people who have repeatedly experienced it and its usually someone local.
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But this is nothing new. Marketing and styling are often used to try to convince us of things that are not true. That the Mazda Miata is a sports car. That Subway sandwiches are healthy. That Fox News is actually news. Etcetera.
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Woah, woah, woah: it may be fun to make fun of but Miatas are NOT bad cars.
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The Miata is absolutely a sports car. And specifically is one of the last hold outs of earlier (often British) sports cars that were relatively low powered in terms of horse power or engine size. Geared more towards light weight and handling. “Sports car” doesn’t equate to giant engine and fastest thing in a straight line. Those things are engineered with strict weight distribution, low weight, and modifiability in mind. All of which is entirely in keeping with certain kinds of sports car.
I’m don’t even much like the Miata, nor am I particularly interested in it. But it’s definitely a sports car. And one of very few widely available examples of the tiny less enginey kind that used to be so common.
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Mostly- it’s designed to look impressive. We had an incident with a similar model of safe a few years ago wherein someone who was trying to get the safe opened tried to force the door by steping on the handle- seems the model we had uses that as an intentional weak spot to foil people. We ended up calling a locksmith, who drilled a hole in the side and tapped it open after we put the combination in.
Yep- make it so it’s expensive for the crook to B&E in time, effort, and risk.
If people really want to get in my house, there’s a handful of ways to do it, all of which are very visible, high risk, or slow.
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Whatever did we do before the Internet came along?!
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We used modems to connect to local BBS’s where we took over an hour+ to download a single porn image that was broken into many sub files we had to stitch together before we could see it wasn’t really very good.
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Always has been.
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This is why safes are rated with two numbers: how long it takes someone with experience to break in, and how it takes them to break in silently.
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I dunno, if security theater can convince the researching consumer to buy the safe, it has a decent chance of causing the meth head to go to the next house instead. Or it could convince the sophisticated safecracker that the owner is too stupid to have anything of value inside.
I would be interested in any stats on how often burglars bother trying to open safes; unless the combination is written on a sticky note nearby, or it’s obviously crackable with the same tools used to break into the house, I would guess they prefer to focus their efforts on the low hanging fruit. Insert metaphor about outrunning the next guy the bear is eyeing.
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