5 ms·

Which should I consider more insecure: my garage door, or the deadbolt on my front door? I wonder how commonly lock picking is used in crimes. I've picked a loc

• hvs 11y ago
  Criminals use lock picks when you don't want someone to know that they broke in. Most criminals are the "snatch-and-grab" type. They are more likely to look for an unlocked window or just break a window. Oh, and deadbolts are pretty easy to pick.
  • redblacktree 11y ago
    Or just kick the door down.
    • davnicwil 11y ago
      So true. I once lived in an apartment block where a lot of the other apartments on my floor were burgled one day. The locks did.. nothing. The thieves simply kicked the doors until they splintered at the lock. In fact, one door even snapped clean in half, so it ended up looking like a stable door, with a lower bit no longer attached to the lock which was now opening freely. I'd wager it took them a similar amount of time to do this as picking a lock would have taken for someone experienced, and with far less training. It taught me a very practical lesson about security. You can spend a lot of energy engineering the perfect lock, but always be aware that there will likely be obvious (once they've happened at least), perhaps very course, hacks which make that brilliant lock totally redundant. The parallels to software security are obvious. To loosely quote Richard Campbell, it doesn't matter how strong your password is, if a truly determined bad guy wants to get at your data, they'll just use a wrench ;-)
• jandrese 11y ago
  My parents did the thing where they put keyed deadbolts on all of the doors. So when someone wanted to break in they broke the glass on the door, discovered the deadbolt, broke the glass on another door and discovered the deadbolt, then broke the glass on a third door before yet again being foiled by the deadbolt. Then they broke a window and stole our stuff anyway. Apparently they were professional thieves too, since they were hitting half a dozen houses each day while driving through the state. The cops finally caught them when they were pulled over for driving on expired tags or something stupid. They had robbed over 100 homes in two weeks before they were caught. The only thing the deadbolts did was to make us replace three extra windows.
  • wlesieutre 11y ago
    They're also frequently banned by fire codes because you can't get out of the house without the key. Blocking egress paths is a no-no. http://ct.gov/dds/lib/dds/safety/door_locking_arrangements.pdf http://ct.gov/dds/lib/dds/safety/door_locking_arrangements.p...
  • Joky 11y ago
    It reminds me of a friend that never lock his very old car so that no-one will break a window to see if there is something to steal inside.
    • billyhoffman 11y ago
      About 15 years ago, my aunt stopped locking her convertible. She used to, but people would slit the closed top to reach in and unlock the door to look for CDs and such to steal. A few hundred bucks to replace the top was way worse than losing some change and such. Then she switched to a late 90's Miata which had a lockable center storage bin/arm rest.
      • bitJericho 11y ago
        A relative of mine had to do the same. He's considering sticking those scary spring snakes in the center console as retribution.
• discardorama 11y ago
  > Which should I consider more insecure: my garage door, or the deadbolt on my front door? Your garage. Such attacks can be done remotely, sitting in your car. You can open the garage door; hang around for a while, and then casually saunter in. But an attack on the front door requires physical presence at the door, and hence easier to detect.
• logfromblammo 11y ago
  No housebreaker with an ounce of brains would use a lock pick before trying a bump key first. The locks on your house are almost certainly bumpable. The locks at your workplace might be more secure. That's fine, though. If you make the lock on your front door more secure, the weak point is now the latching mechanism, the door frame, or the door itself. Or perhaps it is your sliding patio door, that can be levered. Maybe you left a window unlocked. Or your garage door has a code that can be MITM'ed or brute forced. The thing that saves most people is that there is really nothing worth stealing in their house. If a fence pays 10% of retail for stolen goods, I'm not certain there is any single thing in my home worth more than $25 to a burglar, other than the emergency cash. Rather than take the TV or any of the decade-old cap-rot Dell computers that have been re-capped, someone would be better off stealing all the meat out of the fridge, because at least they can eat that.
  • davnicwil 11y ago
    > The thing that saves most people is that there is really nothing worth stealing in their house Agreed. I lived in a houseshare a couple of years ago where the housemates didn't want to chip in for contents insurance. At first I was shocked, and thought about paying the whole house premium myself, but then I actually thought about it properly for the first time and realised that the sheer difficulty of removing and reselling my mostly quite heavy valuables (things like TV, drumkit, etc) and finding/sorting though even the smaller ones scattered around the place, would mean that any burglar that did get in would probably just decide to leave it. It wouldn't be worth the risk, effort, or arguably even their time. I've not thought twice about contents insurance since. It's probably a product that makes no sense for a significant proportion of people (when you're renting and damage to furniture/appliances etc is covered by the landlord's insurance, of course!).
    • jrnvs 11y ago
      Except when your house burns down or floods.
  • 15155 11y ago
    > The locks on your house are almost certainly bumpable 2-sided Abloy Protec 2 elite, locking-thumb-turn deadbolt on a metal door with a metal frame.