You may trust all those you give keys to, but others may have had access to keys before you moved in, or while the house or flat was vacant. I resecured a house recently after a few ‘strange occurrences’ that made it clear that someone was letting themselves in. The owner was adamant that he…

It occurred to me a few days ago that there is a simple way past many security systems in this semi-Internet-of-Things time. There are a large number of devices that use an SDcard, USB device or other removable storage media. There is an old attack where a specially prepared USB stick is dropped in our…

This topic came up again recently. Where does the word “Peterman”, to mean a safe blower-up-er, come from? It would be down to a scholar to do some digging and find the actual answer. Or I could just look on Google and find out…   The 2 competing theories: Personally I’ve always thought of Saltpetre…

A question that I’m sure not many people consider is “Do I actually need an alarm?” The answer, similarly unconsidered, is probably not. But that is with caveats. As a professional, I’ve broken into hundreds of houses a year for the best part of a decade. So, you’d think I’d be partly deaf from the…

Doing the rounds again this week is the old news that the accelerometers in various devices, notably the iPhone, can be used to spy on a users input. In 2009 they were claiming 80% accuracy on iPhone 4.(1) Tiny variations in the movement of the phone can be decoded to tell almost exactly where people…

Stumbled across this earlier. I have a lot of dealings with the edges of criminality. I replace locks when keys are stolen, under a court warrant I break into places that may or may not have an owner, I see the results of burglary and repair them to a higher standard, and I open houses…

With the Queen’s Speech mere hours away, here is some very vaguely related news. Incorrigible rogues can sleep safely at night (or whenever) – it is no longer a criminal offence to be one in England and Wales. 308 other offences were also removed from the books. (Or perhaps haven’t been yet because it happens…

A new initiative to boost confidence in the UK police has been launched.  Islington, Lewisham and Havering in London are having specifically targeted ultra-local posters at bus stops and other “street level” locations on roads and other locations that are deemed to have a crime or anti-social behaviour problem. http://content.met.police.uk/Campaign/localpolicing R2D2 on steroids? Or a…