NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't Welcome once more, valued readers, to another Monday and another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers like your good selves share tales of tech misadventure. Last week's reminiscence by "Erik" about locking himself in a client's premises inspired several readers to share similar tales. "Bilbo," for instance (not his …
When I was a grad student decades ago, you were not considered "human" by the other grad students until you could demonstrate that you could (1) make a set of lock picking tools which these days you can just buy on Amazon (2) pick the crappy locks used in office furniture & file cabinets in under 30 seconds using a paper clip & screw driver, (3) pick the institutions door locks in under an hour with your self-made tools and (4) you have made a skeleton/master key for the institution's door locks. God only knows where my picks and master key ended up, but opening crappy locks used in office furniture & file cabinets is a skill that comes in handy once or twice a decade.
"When I was a grad student decades ago, you were not considered "human" by the other grad students until you could demonstrate that you could (1) make a set of lock picking tools which these days you can just buy on Amazon (2) pick the crappy locks used in office furniture & file cabinets in under 30 seconds using a paper clip & screw driver, (3) pick the institutions door locks in under an hour with your self-made tools and (4) you have made a skeleton/master key for the institution's door locks. God only knows where my picks and master key ended up, but opening crappy locks used in office furniture & file cabinets is a skill that comes in handy once or twice a decade."
Your name is Richard Feynmann and I claim my £5!
I didn't go nearly so far as making my own tools, but a friend bought me a pick set for my birthday one year. I had played around the pick set at home and learned how to use it fairly well on the kind of locks one has around their home. A group met on Fridays after work in the Engineering building for pizza and hacking, and while I wasn't in Engineering I knew one of the group and was a semi regular member. I brought the pick set and to demonstrate picked the lock on one of the doors in about 30 seconds. I found I was able to pick any door lock we tried in the building, even the ones to a few "secure" labs they had where research happened related to government contracts.
One of the group was a sysadmin for the Engineering department, he told the department head how easy it was to pick the locks on the secure labs. They had electronic locks for access but had retained key access for janitorial staff or whatever. They removed the key access, then a few months later the power went out and someone needed to get into the lab to properly shut down an experiment that would otherwise render months of work useless. Unfortunately the battery back up to the electronic lock had failed without anyone noticing, and they couldn't get in in time and lots of very expensive research was destroyed.
So they put a physical lock back on those doors, but they were some kind of fancy "pick proof" locks. I know almost no physical locks are truly pick proof, but they were definitely pick proof against my meager skills!
It is everywhere I've worked.
Most lock controllers are now PoE, so when the switch is powered down, the lock will either fail secure, or fail safe. Most sensible installers will add a battery back-up to any external doors, and those controllers have a local database of recently used cards for when they lose contact with the central server.
The last big place I worked at had dedicated wiring for the electronic locks. That wiring ended up at a big box in the Facilities/Security building, with a dedicated Windows PC in the Security room connected to the control box via RS232C.
Most servers, the NOC, the mainframes, and the Help Desk all resided in four different buildings.
That sounds like an old (and probably very reliable) system. The RS232 / 485 systems were great, but more expensive to install, and usually relied solely on the central data store, so power cuts would see the lock controllers fail. The place I currently work had that problem. and we all got locked out one morning after a powercut saw all the external doors firmly locked. Luckily someone had left a window open, so the smallest member of staff had to break in and physically remove the magnet from the front door.
I don't think I've seen a hard wired system that works with anything newer than Windows 7, so probably best to keep the system well away from the internet. Great for a single site, not so great for a multi-site operation.
The security building had its own Diesel generator and battery back-up system, but it was "their" system, IT was kept away from it, and I knew nothing about their maintenance and test procedures, if any.
The locks ran on 24 VDC, and the control PC ran Windows 3.1. (It was in the 1990s/early 2000s.)
As I remember the story. Target stores had the heating and AC systems sharing the network with the credit card readers. So someone hacked the credit card readers after first hacking into the heating and AC system.
So they got lots of credit card numbers. And I got a new card.
I'd initially thought this was about building security and the way companies spend thousands on e-security only to leave themselves wide open to a 'people hack'. As in a recent BBC podcast on this topic. There's a book too.
People Hacker: Confessions of a Burglar for Hire https://www.amazon.co.uk/People-Hacker-Jenny-Radcliffe/dp/1398519014
That actually ended up happening, popping hinges is the oldest trick in the book!
I think one of the issues is that it seems like many "high-tech" security systems are designed without consulting designers of "legacy" security systems, which effectively means every lesson they learned the hard way, has to be learned yet again.
You commonly see logically bulletproof electronic systems, but they can be bypassed by shims, magnets, picking poor backup locks, or simply a large heavy object.
The LockPickingLawyer has a great series of videos comically bypassing locks, i highly recommend watching them if you want a good laugh.
A few years ago I was working at a large boarding school.
Its location in a small, respectable town meant that security wasn't really a high priority, with most buildings unlocked for much of the day, even though the local towns people would regularly walk their dogs in the grounds.
During lockdown though, we had a few issues with visitors to the area wandering around the buildings, somehow assuming we were a local attraction (the buildings were open so the site team and IT department could take advantage of the empty site to do essentially upgrades)
One of the leadership decided we needed to join the 21st century and ordered a fancy Paxton 10 system. At no point did he let us know in IT until the engineer arrived on site to do the install.
This system was so new, the engineer had never seen one before, and as he'd only just returned from furlough that morning, he'd not had any training - hurdle number 1
Hurdle number 2 - these locks all used PoE+, and we had no spare capacity on the PoE switches, so we needed new switches for every building, 15 new switches were ordered for next day delivery.
Hurdle number 3 - there was no structured cabling anywhere near most of the doors, so we had to run new wiring.
The system was installed, tested and commissioned just in time for the kids to return from lockdown 2
Hurdle number 4 - the locks were bluetooth, something the guy who ordered the locks hadn't thought about, naturally. His answer, the kids can download the app to their phones. Ahh, they're not allowed their phones in lessons. We could order 600 bluetooth fobs, I suggest. Ahh, nothing left in the budget.
We estimate the 30 locks, with 15 switches, cabling, 4 days installation time, new server and software, cost around £3,000 per door, and they were never used.
The server was quite nice though, an i7 Intel NUC which found a use controlling a display wall in the new 6th Form building
Manglement gets a "bright" idea and goes about spending money without any analysis whatsoever.
The new kit cannot be installed without yet more kit, so another round of spending because hey, manglement is never wrong, right ?
Finally, new kit is installed at x times the cost, hits another hurdle and manglement gives up.
At least you got a nice server out of it.
That's hilarious, i see this sort of thing a lot but they rarely score that high on the incompetence scale!
You're also damn lucky you could get your hands on that many switches during that time period. I have pretty good rapport with a couple of large vendors but i was really struggling to get my hands on switches during that time period.
We were going to order those switches for a different project at another school site, so they'd been reserved for us.
The huge overspend on the access control SNAFU meant that project was sidelined.
What we did have a huge problem with was webcams, they were rare as hens teeth, and kept going missing, so had to be replaced. I ended up ordering a box full direct from Logitech at about 3x the pre-pandemic price, it was handy having the IT director's credit card details...
Oh man, we had a couple of customers like that too. Offices got raided for WFH purposes, they decided it was a good idea to hand out all equipment without any form of registration. One of them was particularly bad.
They had moved into a new office a few months prior, and as they were also migrating away from thin clients we decided it was a good idea to replace them with laptops and docking stations instead of PCs. (this turned out to be a great decision when covid hit). Their open office plan didn't allow for many people to be in the building, so WFH it is. Of course, just a laptop screen wouldn't suffice, so a monitor and keyboard+mouse set had to be set up at home. Because they just let everyone take whatever they wanted without asking questions or writing anything down, the office was pretty much raided by the time we noticed and stepped in (we also didn't do many on-site visits in those initial few weeks as we were still figuring out protocols).
Final tally when they returned to office: about half of their peripherals had dissappeared without a trace, and a good chunk of what was left over was not coming back because they wanted to keep working from home. To make matters worse, they had a fairly high employee turnover so the chances of them ever turning up again were very slim.
At a guess the locks might have used only 1-3 ports per switch, but they had to replace them all because they didn't have enough power budget left for PoE to power something as power hungry as a lock servo.
Or maybe they really only needed to replace 5 of the 15 but had to replace them all because the new switches were from a different vendor and they didn't trust IEEE standards were properly followed for full vendor interoperability on all the features they were using.
Or perhaps most likely they just didn't like the idea of having a mixed set of switches in the school - if they already had them reserved for another school presumably this one was a little further down the list for having all its switches replaced so they just moved it up in line.
I think Pratchett had Rincewind in a condemned cell in Fourex (continent of), contemplating his imminent fate and the ceiling where read the advice to look at the door hinges.
Apparently we Antipodeans are daft enough to put the hinges of cells on the prisoner's side although I suppose it would evolve through Darwinian selection a smarter if not better class of convict than those originally issued.
I replaced my one exterior door with a new prehung steel door.
It took me awhile to figure out why the hinges had tabs that went into the other side of the hinge when the door was closed. Then I realized that if the hinge pins where on the outside of the door. The tabs would keep the door from falling out if the hinge pins were removed. Not high security, but at least you'd have to have pry bar or big screw driver to get the door to pop off the rest of the way.
Many years ago I used to install access systems in office buildings.
One day, while standing in the elevator lobby, I used one of our walkie talkies to see if a coworker was ready to take their lunch break.
When I pressed the talk button I noticed all the door status indicators for the floor turn to green for the allocated entrance time.
I tried it again when they had returned to red indicating a locked status and the same thing happened.
After some additional trial and error I determined it was the motion sensor on the secured side of the door that was intercepting the radio signal and interpreting it as a person approaching the door.
The software was seeing proper motion sensor requests from the sensor and opened all the doors that had sensors within about 25' of the walkie when it was activated.
Needless to say we had to source other devices and replace the ones that were already installed, probably about 20 stories worth at that point in the project.
Good times.
"The LockPickingLawyer has a great series of videos comically bypassing locks, i highly recommend watching them if you want a good laugh."
Deviant Ollam, <https://www.youtube.com/@DeviantOllam> has a bunch of videos on bypassing physical security that are a good set of lessons. Many of the techniques are based on fire code requirements that are in place to assure people can leave a burning building. Other's are poor access control, so while there is a very good lock on the door and pulling the pins on the hinges won't work, there might be loads of rickety key boxes on the wall next to the door to allow service workers with a code to access the key to get in the building. I do a lot of work in real estate these days so I'm pretty good at getting into lock boxes quickly. I also provide a service to unlock an estate agent's box of key boxes that they've locked themselves out of. I can't charge too much as those things are cheap, but it buys a few pints to consume while doing it sat in front of the telly. It also ingratiates myself to them so I keep getting work from them to produce media they need to sell the properties.
Darknet Diaries and, to a lesser extent, Malicious Life have both done multiple episodes on using social engineering to bypass both physical and logical barriers put up by companies with huge security budgets. Jenny Radcliffe (who wrote the book Nifty linked to above) was on Darknet Diaries ep #90 (simply called "Jenny"), and there have been many others. Anything with Rachel Tobac is worth listening to, as is Alethe Denis; but pretty much all of them are fascinating. (There are occasional exceptions where you can tell that the person being interviewed is CLEARLY exaggerating what happened to them and don't get challenged by the interviewer.)
Some ploys used by social engineers are extremely elaborate, but in many cases the old trope of people always stopping to let a person wearing a high-viz vest and carrying a clipboard through any door still seems to hold scarily true.
Any large site (where there are generally ALWAYS some contractor or other on site) walk up to door with hi Viz and a hard hat and ideally hands full of something or other "could you get the door for me please?"
That or attire suitable for the company (so a bit of recon in advance) pick moment people are flooding in and blend with crowd or if challenged say you've just started / looking for (name off website)
occurred at my university when the builders of a shiny new building forgot to install electronic locks on certain doors. These were doors to labs with kit like powerful lasers or other expensive and potentially dangerous kit was housed. Apart from not installing an electronic lock, no mechanical lock was installed either, so anyone could just stroll into these labs. Quite apart from kit being stolen, sauntering into a lab where powerful lasers are being operated without wearing suitable safety goggles is not high on my list of recommendations. The building itself is open to the public during daytime, so a lot of people were less than pleased. Quite the security and safety nightmare. Moving labs from the old building to the new had to be delayed.
The Nixon Administration's "plumbers" were undone when they taped-over the openings of striker plates of doorlocks while they were breaking into the Democratic Party's headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.
A semi-ept security guard found the tape and removed it (yet did not call in a general alert).
I expect a techie's hold-the-door-open chocks would be removed, if discovered by Security.
When you work on premises for longer than their normal hours it is a good idea to ask the security body that checks you in who will lock up for the night and when they start so you can let them know not to close down before you sign out.
Safety rules (see icon) usually allow you to leave the building after lock down (at least if you don't mind triggering alarm systems) but it can be a lot tricker to get your car out through locked gates.
Let's remember that any halfway decent alarm system will get very annoyed and start calling in reinforcements if a door is detected as being held open for more than, say, a minute.
But of course, halfway decent is entirely too expensive for the tastes of modern management. It's a wonder they don't just put up phony alarm boxes on the outside, as I hear is now the fashion in the UK.
"Let's remember that any halfway decent alarm system will get very annoyed and start calling in reinforcements if a door is detected as being held open for more than, say, a minute."
Now of course what happens if the alarm/monitoring system doesn't detect doors that are very slightly (i.e. maybe 1-1.5cm at the non-hinge side) open?
I worked at a mobile OpCo whose then new HQ had an unmanned door directly on a public street which led to their unmanned Data Centre. Said door was remotely monitored (I was required to phone Security before unlocking the door to explain my reason for accessing DC) and unlocked by a proximity card but said door also seemed to occasionally bounce when closing and end up sitting just off the maglock and yet close enough for the door closure sensor to believe it was closed.
Frequently when I went to this DC I discovered this door sitting unlocked with no alarm being triggered. Then again the same DC had some other security-related "issues" as well, as did at least one other of their DCs.
We were at bank's HQ, and were meant to be escorted every where. We were only allowed in the operations room in special circumstances.
On our last day we had a meeting scheduled for the conference room in the operations area.
We parked our car, walked to the building and saw the door locks were green, so in we went, and found the operations area. The cleaner was there doing the room, and had blocked the door open to use the power supply outside the area. We smiled at the cleaner, said Hello, and sat down and did our preparation.
A little while later someone(we were working with) came past and asked "How did you guys get in here". We explained.
He came back later and said that there had been a little glitch with the outside doors (power ?) and they all unlocked for about 30 seconds. He also said he would fix the cleaner. I think this meant education and the provision of a "cleaner's socket" inside the secure area.
Once worked for a large, well known <REDACTED> where friday afternoon lunches in the local pubs were the norm. Returning back to your desk, not so much.
Anyway, to get back on site, you had to show your ID card. All of you. In cars.
One of my colleagues was infamous for having shown a piece of toast that he'd snaffed by the pub instead
"Anyway, to get back on site, you had to show your ID card. All of you. In cars."
Spent some time working at a Scandinavian mobile OpCo who had a "smart" access control system - you couldn't gain access if the system thought you were already in the underground DC.
Heading out for lunch with the OpCo staff everyone had to remember to touch their access card on the reader otherwise upon returning from lunch that particular person's card would be refused entry as the system thought they were still inside.
Whenever that happened the person had to look at the entry camera, phone security, and convince the (remote) security staff that they were the right person and that they'd forgotten to "badge out" when going for lunch before security would reset their card status for them to get back in.
"Serious UK govt building, gated with access via a card. The gates were two and a half feet from floor level, eminently jumpable.
Why bother?"
That reminds me of a photo where there's a barrier across a driveway with open flat fields on either side... with lots of wear from people just driving around the barrier. Even if you had a key........
Many years ago my wife and I were touring Europe in our Mk111 Cortina and Sears Roebuck tent, we were leaving Italy over the Splugen pass into Switzerland. At the top of the pass, there are two Border Control barriers, where passports must be shown (before the EU eliminated this requirement). Late Saturday evening we arrived to find both offices securely locked, and both of the barriers wide open. Security? what security?
Working overnight when the power went out. Generator didn't kick in (broken switch in the start panel), and because of a fault on the building management system, switching to UPS failed too - and was behind 3 locked doors (locks failed shut with loss of power).
We had no choice but to kick the doors open (which was fun with only a small torch, especially as one of the rooms was a lights-out machine room - eerie in its own right as we were so used to the noise we usually heard in there).
Still, one screwdriver in the switch started up the generator. The rest of the night was spent recovering systems.
A station for one of the Utilities had a standby generator as a matter of course. It was tested every month. In consequence, when it was called to run in anger, there was no fuel left in the day-tank. Great savings had been made by not installing a level-sensor; instead the operators had to climb a ladder to look at the sight-glass on the tank. Which they did, but the reporting loop was never completed.
As the supplier/contractor, blame was aimed at us until we showed them their instruction to remove the sensor.
We just had a dip-stick. One of us would climb the ladder, open up the tank, and dip in a stick. I don't remember if it had any measurements, or whether it was a case of seeing if there was fuel in there.
Part of any new joiner's hazing was to get locked in the generator room for the duration of the generator test. Luckily for me, I was wise to this as I'd done work experience there before I joined full time.
This was back in the 80s, and the generator was in a small out-building.
Fun times!
Once, while working at a customer's premises, I got a call from a potential new employer. Not wanting to be overheard, I wandered into the service stairs for some privacy.
After ending the call, I tried to go back, but the doors only opened from the inside without a card, something I hadn't been provided with. I had my phone with me but, unluckily, no service in there.
I tried knocking on the door hoping someone would listen, but in the end I had to walk down 18 floors to the entrance lobby, then call my client so I could return as I hadn't brought any ID with me....
At a meeting of a large government department in view of the Palace of Westminster (with armed police guards roaming the area), I left the meeting half way through as the remainder wasn't relevant to me.
I couldn't exit the building as the doors required a key card or similar. Cue flustered senior manglement type, "what are you doing?", to which I replied "I'm trying to leave the building"
I was informed I should have been escorted out, to which I said "I didn't know that!".
So he used his keycard to let me out. Didn't ask for any identification.
It rather seemed as if he didn't really understand what the measures were trying to achieve.
We had a location like that, where the person that was supposed to let us in, accidently came out to get us from a smoke break, not bringing his card with him.
They showed us a neat trick, the automatic door sensor on the inside could be tricked, by moving a shadow along the floor making it think something was there and we could get in.
It was a very poorly made comparison camera sensor. It would take pictures, and when they differed enough it opened the door. They noticed this when the sun would move to a certain position and a truck would drive past.
I worked in a diagnostic virology lab in a teaching hospital. The corridor we were in was partially stolen from us in a land grab by the University. The corridor was also a handy thoroughfare to distant parts of the hospital. Then came the Ebola scare (we're all going to die!!) and the Health and Safety people coughed up for card swipe locks on the ends of the corroiodr to stop joe public wandering through "looking for radiotherapy" (this was common ploy for scrotes looking for handbags to rummage through). The University refused point blank to use them. "It's so inconvenient sob, sob".
It turned out to be extremely convenient for a scrote on the prowl, as did the nifty Apple iMac with the handy carrying handle moulded into the case. Somebody's PhD thesis went with it...
The doors were activated and cards issued the next week.
a bit further north in the sunniest place in Scotland
Our Health and Safety rep had a constant running battle with University staff over wearing gloves outside the lab. They insisted there was no hazard, but we were a Microbiology lab and gloves were forbidden in the corridor!!
Is it sad that without even reading your lower comment that I KNEW exactly which hospital you meant?
I know someone whose company built one area related to either virology or pharmacy, apparently the floor had to be torn up and relaid as the cherry picker / scissor lift spilled oil or diesel and any contamination of this floor was a massive no no, why they werent sure on, they just knew their boss went thermonuclear on the culprits due to how much the floor cost to remediate
I was commissioning the network in a partially fitted office and was sitting in the comms room working away. It got to about 5:15 and I thought that is it for the night time to ago home.
I walked out the comms room and thought it was a bit quiet, nobody else was around walked downstairs and found the front doors were locked led as were the other doors including the fire escapes.
I had to call someone from the other building to come across and let me out - the builders got rod off for not checking everyone had signed out before locking up
I once owned a Rover 214. It had central locking but not a remote. There were solenoids on just three of the doors which pulled and pushed the button. The driver's door had no solenoid, just a switch which was activated by the button going up and down. The button on this door was somewhat loose.
One winter, car needs scraping, get in car, start engine, blower and rear window heater on, obtain scraper, exit car, close door...
...door locks itself as the button comes down of its own accord and of course, all the other doors lock too.
Spare key in house.
House locked.
House key on same keyring as car key.
Ever since, if I've needed to get out of a car while leaving the engine running, I've opened a window first, even though cars don't have that kind of locking system any more.
On a related note my current car - a Kia - only has "deadlock" on the doors, so if you lock the doors and there is someone in the car, they can't get out. It's also possible to lock yourself in the car - leave the keys in the car with a teenager while I pop to get some milk. Teenager uses key fob to lock the car. When I return a few minutes later, teenager tries to use keyfob to unlock the car, car totally unresponsive. Also doesn't work with the button on the dash. Locked doors are deadlocked so can't open from inside. Pushing the "START" button (without foot on clutch) puts the car into "orange" mode, and the controls spring into life. Not at all scary, no sir!
I dread to think what would happen in an accident if the doors didn't unlock themselves...
M.
I have had (and still have) cars that will lock themselves
worst was a Range Rover (1990 classic) which had central locking and a lazy solenoid, it would unlock but not lift the button past the mid-point so any vibration would make the button drop and lock all the doors, it quickly became standard practice to open the window as soon as you unlocked the car.
current one is a landcruiser which will relock the doors after 1 minute if you unlock the doors, open and close any door and then don't put the keys in the ignition, very easy to get locked out with the keys left on a seat.
Nastiest (not self locking) one was a Vauxhall Omega where the owner always used the deadlock feature (double press the lock button and even the key in the door will not unlock the car), this was all well & good until the car was left standing and the battery died completely, can't unlock without power, can't get to battery without getting into the car.
Luckily the Boot didn't deadlock and could be opened with the key, so a size 11 boot was put through the little hatch between the boot & back seat and then a helpful child was slid through and told to pull the bonnet release.
I had a Rover 75 with a damaged drivers door lock. It was a cost-reduced "Drive" model (when Rover were desperately trying to save pennies per car just before they went down), so there was only this one lock on the drivers door, and not even one on the boot (I bought it really cheap, so I knew about this issue)
I had two fobs, so I didn't worry too much, at least until the main 12V battery dropped dead one frosty night. I then discovered how to break in to said Rover 75 by reaching through the drivers side front wheel arch to insert a hooked very stiff wire to pull the bonnet release cable so I could replace the battery and get access to the car again.
The fact that the inner wheel arch had a very convenient hole in it, obviously cut by a previous owner, and that there were marks in the door trim where someone had tried to pry the doors open suddenly made sense, as this was almost certainly not the first time this had happened to this car!
"I then discovered how to break in to said Rover 75 by reaching through the drivers side front wheel arch to insert a hooked very stiff wire to pull the bonnet release cable so I could replace the battery and get access to the car again."
Way back in the bronze age when I was in high school a guy I knew modded his car to have electronic door latches and no handles. His backup was a connector in the front grill to be able to hook up power so he could open the doors and pop the hood. His "key" was a jumpered PCB that plugged in a secret spot to open the door.
Many moons ago (before remote fobs) a colleague explained to me how to lock a car without the key if your hands were full of child picked up from the back seat. You lean through the back door, over to the front door and press the locking button, then when you close the back door (using a portion of your anatomy not encumbered) the car locks.
When I had occasion to try this trick (getting a cardboard box off the back seat), I managed to shut my tie in the car door (I know, I know). I had the keys in my pocket, but not the flexibility to get my hand into the required pocket without dropping the box (obviously full of fragile valuables). I ended up propping the box between my goulies and the car door while I wormed my hand into my offside trouser pocket and freed myself. "where have you been?" says the wife...
Volvo has another trick that's in every car. If the vehicle is unlocked and you pull the door handle too fast, it will NOT open - you have to repeat it, slower, which is great for emergency situations, not..
I've not found an explanation yet, but a mechanic and I went through an entire dealer's showroom - every car we tried had the same issue so it's by design.
I had a 1987 Mercedes, which had pneumatic locks. By pulling up or pushing down the button/stick at the window on the driver's door, all the other doors would lock or unlock as appropriate. This particular car had a bizarre habit:
When my girlfriend was in the car with me, the doors would automatically lock themselves when I turned off the car. Just about every time, and it would only do it when it was her specifically, not someone else or just me. We ended up naming the car "Trouble".
Turns out she habitually put her arm by the window, and was leaning on the button (not being used to that style of lock), which would cause it to go down, locking just that one door. But being a pneumatic system, when there was no longer power applied, having the one button pushed down would somehow trigger the rest to lock also.
The girl outlasted the car (transmission failure) - we've been married 20+ years. I guess you could say we're definitely locked into the marriage.
I tried using a rugby player to get a door open, since someone had forgotten to authorise our key-cards for a demo or something. The magnet holding it shut can't be that strong, surely. He was a big lad but he just bounced off. We tried him a few times but no joy.
Seems none of us were creative nor light-fingered enough to think of the more interesting solutions described.
"I tried using a rugby player to get a door open, since someone had forgotten to authorise our key-cards for a demo or something. The magnet holding it shut can't be that strong, surely. He was a big lad but he just bounced off. We tried him a few times but no joy.
Seems none of us were creative nor light-fingered enough to think of the more interesting solutions described.”
Yes, well if the good old ‘brute force and ignorance’ approach doesn’t work, then best to just give it up!
back in the early 80s when proximity censors were VERY much in their infancy, a defense contractor i worked for in Gilead added them to the doors. now if you had your hands full when you walked up, and couldn't free your card, you could lean against the reader.
i did so one day with my keys/fag packet combined and NO card and the door opened. flipping 'eck i thought so i let security know hoping for at least a thanks you. NO i got dragged into a side room and interrogated as to why i even tried.
at that point, i knew that was not a company i would work for a long time. a month later i was let go with the flimiest level of excuses!
There was a period when I worked for a large tech firm which had magnetic locks on the doors to the central core (where the toilets were) on every floor. The card readers were not reliable. Working late in the lab one night, I went out for a bathroom break and then couldn't get back in because the reader was on the blink. Being the only person there, I needed to get back in if only to get my car keys.
So I decided to experiment a bit. Despite being fairly weedy, I discovered I could defeat the lock on the outward opening door by giving it a really violent jerk, so long as all the effort was put into the first half-inch of movement. So I did manage to get my keys and go home.
Security were not best impressed when I told them, but at least I told them. I do hope it's been fixed in the intervening 20 years.
Where I used to work, paranoia was running rampant so electronic locks were being installed right & left. I had to attend a meeting in one of the offices where one of the new electronic locks had been installed. When I tried to used my pass card it didn't work. It seems when they installed that lock, on the door to our IT department, they neglected to connect it to the lock network so many of the keys were just so much wasted plastic. And for some reason they didn't like my suggestion that next time I'd bring a pick hammer with me as the door and windows were plain glass.
A colleague was working at a new divisional HQ. This was during the 80s so the building had brand new access controls. Most of the staff worked 9 to 5.
They wouldn't give him an access card because he was based at a different site.
During the install process he decided to go for a cigarette break in the car park.
It was after five o'clock so the solitary security guy was on his rounds.
Consequently, he was unable to get access after he'd finished smoking.
He decided to have another ciggie and a think.
He noticed somebody exit the building without having to present an access card. (The main door was double sliding glass doors.)
He took a piece of A4 paper from his car, slotted it between the two glass doors and wiggled it about.
You shouldn't be able to enter a secure, expensive building that way.
Some places need good security, but many don't. To have a "cloud" based access control system is silly. At the most, an electronic locking system should be local to the building and it's not like it takes a rack of top end computers to make it go. I've got old XP and W7 boxes doing simple things since I can get those for free in an almost endless supply. They can be connected online if you just ratchet them down really hard to be able to remotely manage adding and subtracting authorized key cards. Physical locks are still very useful since electricity can go away at any time for all sorts of reasons and the same applies even more to network connections. It only sounds like a good idea to manage campus-wide access from a central location.
I just watched yet another video of somebody chucking a rock through the window of a closed business and kicking in the glass to get inside. They got a whopping $10, from where wasn't disclosed, but if it was a cash register, that was stupidity on the owner's side for leaving cash out like that. The thing is, the person was in and out faster than the police could respond to any alarm. That's a case where the physical barriers are meant to prevent theft. Keeping people from casually sauntering through the server room is a much more simple task, or should be. It's down to "horses for courses" once again. By complicating something needlessly, the unintended issues become more of a problem than what the locks were meant to prevent.
I was working at a local attraction as a contractor. The first day we were loading in our gear to a storage room and would set everything up the next. The manager for the site gave me a key so we could unlock and lock the storage room as we moved things a fair distance from the loading door to the room. By the time we were done, he'd buggered off for the day so I held on to the key since I had no idea who I might return it to. The marking on the key hinted that it might open a lot of things so I stopped off to have some copies made on the way home, just in case. It did turn out to unlock everything in that section of the property including some historically significant items on display. It came in legitimate handy as we had equipment up on catwalks and around the space that was all locked and we would have had to find somebody each time we needed access. Nobody twigged I had a key sourced informally and shouldn't. They saw me going here and there doing my job and likely assumed it was all good. So much for a security plan if exceptions are made. I don't suppose the site manager was ever to let somebody have possession of that key, but the alternative would have been for him to be the door warden and stay onsite until we were done that day. How inconvenient, right?
When I was working in the Site Services Department of a large electrical manufacturer, I was entrusted with the Submaster Key for our section of the much larger site,so I had access to everywhere on our watch, but not the other three companies on the site. I once had occasion to borrow the Barrel Removal Key from Site Security, and noticed that it was only a couple of wards different from my Submaster key. Just a few strokes with a swiss file, and I had my very own Barrel Removal Key, which greatly eased my daily operations.
New magnets - really do need access control.
Shown the kit by the lead and how it was all keypad access to the main doors etc.
So I asked what the two mains isolator switches above the door were for.
Don't know...
I demonstrated that they provided power to the door locks. Left door, right door. I was asked not to share. not 'til now.
Still there when I left a few years later. Whether they were still connected that way??
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