How Safe Is Your Safe?, Part Two

In Part One of “How Safe Is Your Safe?” we looked at the types of burglary safes available and where to put them in your home. Next, we will consider the most common ways of breaking into your safe.

Safe Manipulation Versus Lock Manipulation

The easiest way for a thief to gain the contents of your safe is to steal the whole safe and open it at his leisure. That is why, as we mentioned in the previous article, the ‘safest safes’ are those that are installed in the walls of your home. So assuming the thief is going to have to open the safe on the premises, his biggest obstacle is time.

Keeping in that in mind, there are two basic types of safe cracking: safe manipulation and lock manipulation. Safe manipulation includes drilling, torching, exploding – basically any method of getting into your safe that doesn’t involve having to figure out the combination. This is what Valdes considers the “low road”. The “high road”, then, is lock manipulation. “Lock manipulation represents safecracking at its most pure form.”

Lock Manipulation

While safe cracking does require listening carefully while turning the dial on a safe, that is where TV/movies and reality part ways. Beyond just listening, the thief must also graph results, repeating the process over and over, until they have narrowed down to the most probable numbers in the combination. And since there is no way to determine what order the numbers are in, they then must begin working through all the possible combinations of those numbers. The more numbers in the combination, the more possibilities.

The bottom line is that cracking the code on a safe is both labor and time intensive, which is why, “Lock manipulation is used more by locksmiths than safecrackers because of the skill and time needed to pull it off“ (source: Valdes). That leaves safe manipulation.

Safe Manipulation

“The most common method safecrackers use to manipulate the safe itself is drilling” (source: Valdes). As a counter measure, many safe manufacturers have installed cobalt plates, which prevent a common drill bit from ever penetrating the lock. It may be possible to drill through using a diamond or titanium bit, but the thief will go through several drills as “as the bits will outlast the motors” and will take a whole lot of time (source: Valdes).

Another option for the thief is to drill above the cobalt plate in an attempt to see the locking mechanism using a fiber-optic camera called a borescope. However, the counter measure to this is a relocker that “is tripped when the safecracker’s drill bit breaks a sheet of glass or plastic while drilling into the lock” (source: Valdes) Once the relocker is tripped, only a locksmith or safe technician can open the safe.

Other than drilling, the thief can also attempt to cut a hole in the side of your safe – assuming he can remove it from the wall – using oxy-acetylene torches, plasma cutters and thermic lances. Or he can simply attempt to explode it on the premises using nitroglycerin. Of course, these methods generate noise, smoke and require skills that not all thieves have.

So, are you feeling better about your safe? Think again.

What Can You Do To Protect Your Valuables?

No matter what kind of safe you purchase, all safes “…[contain] a fundamental weakness: Every safe must be accessible to a locksmith or other authority in the event of a malfunction or lock-out. This weakness forms the basis of safecracking.” (source: Valdes).

So how do most thieves break into a safe? The answer may surprise you.

Change The Try-Out Combination

“All safes are shipped from the manufacturer with try-out combinations. Ideally a safe owner resets the try-out combination after purchasing the safe. This doesn’t happen as often as you would think. Many safe owners simply buy the safe and use the try-out combination; making their safe easy prey for safecrackers. The try-out combinations for most safes are an industry standard and widely known by both locksmiths and safecrackers” (source: Valdes). So change the combination after your safe is installed!

Keep The Code a Secret

“Surprisingly, many people write the combination down near the safe, if not on the safe itself.” (source: Valdes) Obviously, the smart thief will begin his attempt to crack open your safe by looking around for the combination. So the obvious solution is keep the combination in a secure location, away from the safe itself!

Despite what you may have seen in the movies, safe-cracking is a rare form of burglary. Just having one does not prevent a thief from attempting to steal its contents, but armed with a little knowledge, you can keep your valuables safe inside your safe.