Need to open a DIEBOLD SAFE

Good luck on anyone just coming out and telling you how to break into it - without asking for a cut of the loot inside... The whole idea of a safe is to be resistant to forced entry, and especially on high end items like Diebold there are elaborate safeguards inside to make it slow and difficult on purpose.

Any ethical locksmith, the first thing he does is check you out to make sure you're in lawful possession of that safe and should be let inside. And this might involve a three-way discussion with Local Law Enforcement. If he busts into a stolen safe for you, he becomes an accessory to the original crime - and he doesn't want that.

Then once you pass that test, he takes your money, wanders off to a secure area with the safe - or shoos you out of the room if he has to do it in place - while he breaks into the safe. No pictures or video allowed.

Then he installs a new lock (set to the combination you want) and takes the remains of the old lock with him for disposal so you can't see how it was done.

And the unethical Locksmiths are usually in prison, or working in another profession. The licensing is too stringent, and you don't work in the field without one.

If you want to see how the locking mechanism of your safe works, you'll have to take the door apart yourself later on your own.

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The first thing to do is try the "storage" combination, and the reverse of that in case someone mis-remembered the order when setting it for storage.

Starting to the left:

50 L (past three times and then stop on) 25 R (past two times and then stop on) 50 L (past once and then stop on) 0 R (and then either continue if there is not a turn bar in the center of the knob, or Turn the bar and go back left until it stops.

or perhaps (same pattern)

25 50 25 0

If it is the one which I dealt with at work, there are three full-width shelves inside it. I never tried to change the height, so I'm not sure whether they are movable or not, but I think that they are. We had some interesting classified hardware stored in the bottom of one of them.

And I believe that these were made to resist fire, so they have a thick wall full of asbestos-concrete, which I believe also applies to the floor of the cabinet.

Typically, these things (Diebold, Mosler and similar) have a layer of really nasty stuff to drill through. A mix of concrete, old indexable tool inserts, broken file fragments, and anything else to make the task much more difficult.

Good Luck, DoN.

I go to auctions and I often see safes without keys. They have next to no scrap value, due to concrete between the walls.

Therefore, they usually are free or almost free to take.

I may just buy a couple and try to open them and perhaps shoot a couple of videos on "how to open a safe with a torch".

i

A few safes that I saw, would be easy to open from the bottom with a torch.

i

No honorable locksmith would ever divulge security information like that. Shame on you for asking a locksmith to dishonor himself.

Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus

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I'm getting a DIEBOLD FILE SAFE that is about 5 feet tall and 3 feet wide, double doors. Its locked and there's no combination so I'm probably giong to have to drill the door to get into the combination lock.

I had thought about cutting the bottom panel out of it to gain entry then welding it back in as I did with a Wendy's Restaurant money safe but I don't know if there are any partitions in this box.

I have a TAYLOR safe which I successfully drilled, thanks to a locksmith years ago but I have since lost track of him.

I'm looking for a locksmith or someone else who will tell me what the correct drill point is.

You, I like!

On a slightly related subject. I was approached a couple weeks ago. There is a lock picking club in a city near me. They wanted me to attend their meetings and possibly teach lock picking. I managed to remain far more polite than he deserved, and declined. Which, writing here, is far more polite than I wish to wrote.

I've been in the locksmith trade since 1985.

Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus

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"Bruce L. Bergman (munged human readable)" wrote

Good luck on anyone just coming out and telling you how to break into it - without asking for a cut of the loot inside... The whole idea of a safe is to be resistant to forced entry, and especially on high end items like Diebold there are elaborate safeguards inside to make it slow and difficult on purpose.

Any ethical locksmith, the first thing he does is check you out to make sure you're in lawful possession of that safe and should be let inside. And this might involve a three-way discussion with Local Law Enforcement. If he busts into a stolen safe for you, he becomes an accessory to the original crime - and he doesn't want that.

Then once you pass that test, he takes your money, wanders off to a secure area with the safe - or shoos you out of the room if he has to do it in place - while he breaks into the safe. No pictures or video allowed.

Then he installs a new lock (set to the combination you want) and takes the remains of the old lock with him for disposal so you can't see how it was done.

And the unethical Locksmiths are usually in prison, or working in another profession. The licensing is too stringent, and you don't work in the field without one.

If you want to see how the locking mechanism of your safe works, you'll have to take the door apart yourself later on your own.

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Iggy, I strongly suggest you resist the urge. Unless you want a creative prosecutor to find your training video on the would-be Safe Cracker's computer and charge you as an Accessory...

Just because you CAN do something does not mean you SHOULD.

Commercial Burglary Resistant Safes are rated at how long it takes the average crook without insider knowledge to get into them - and the longer they fumble around with it, the greater chances they get caught in the act.

You 'blow the curve' by teaching the crooks how to do it, and the FBI isn't going to be happy with you.

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So, locksmiths have greater integrity than the rest of us? And does becoming a locksmith require an FBI background check to insure honorable-ity, or what? I seem to recall "Study at Home to be a Locksmith" ads in Popular Mechanics - how did they screen students?

Please.

Bob

I call this bullshit. Seriously.

I am sure that they will not care. There is no law that says I cannot film how I break into a safe that I own.

i

Maybe have a look at episode 2 of the British channel 4 programme "Man Made Home" where they make a home made thermal lance to cut open a safe to convert to a wood stove. Shame it's not BBC as that doesn't have commercials and I can't remember whether it was the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd part of the programme that they cut the safe. When you see the result though it didn't really look like a thermal lance was required just a OA cutter or plasma might have done as the safe looked to be single skinned and not that thick but the lance made for good viewing I expect.

A lance is needed to cut through concrete.

i

Do you know if it is a 3-number combination or 5? If 3 numbers, I'd just try them all, it is probably a lot faster than trying to drill a good safe, even if you knew the exact spot.

Jon

Ask the police if there is a safe-cracker out of jail that does that work. We paid 100$ and it took him 20 minutes and no damage.

I've not seen a photo of his, nor much of a description other than "DIEBOLD" and "two-door", but the safes which the Government uses (at least at army R&D labs, where at least medium classification levels are common) use combination locks with 100 numbers on the dial, and three setable numbers, plus a final zero. And depending on which flavor of locks were used, you either have to hold the dial at that final zero, and turn a small central bar and then rotate it a bit more -- and doing that disturbs the previously set discs, so you have to go through the full dial operation again to try the next. And then you have to try the handle to see whether it really withdrew the bolt -- though you can probably tell by feel once familiar with the lock.

Assuming that all three numbers could be any of the 100, that leaves 1,000,000 combinations to try. Normally, you are advised to avoid number near zero (especially on the last one, but assuming that you avoid 98 through 02, that still leaves 857,375 combinations to try. (And also consecutive numbers should not be too close to each other, which reduces the count a bit more, but not really enough. :-)

Let's assume that my 857,375 count is reasonable, and that it takes about 30 seconds to dial a combination. If you have to try every combination, that calculates to about 297 days of 24 hours a day trials. Drop it back to 8 hours per day (so you can get other things done), and that becomes 893 days -- or well on your way to three years. :-)

And this is not counting some way to keep records of what has been tried. I would advise a computer with a toe-operated switch to increment the numbers -- and with battery backup so you don't lose your count.

Since the combination is likely to be anywhere in the range, you might write a program to generate random numbers, and keep track of which ones have already been tried. You might include statistics to tell you what percentage of the way through the choices you are -- just to keep you depressed until you are a couple of years into the project.

It is not quite as easy as holding a cheap combination padlock in your hand and twiddling while applying strain to the hasp, which is likely to open it without serious concentration in a few minutes. :-)

Oh yes -- this is mounted on something the size of a couple of file cabinets side by side, with thick walls filled with concrete or asbestos/concrete mix to maximize the insulation during a fire, so you can't just bring it over to where you sit down -- you have to go to it, and set up as comfortable a chair as possible which allows you to reach the dial and manipulate it for hours at a time.

You *will* miss-dial some, so you need a way to tell the computer to try that one again (perhaps just by not tapping your toe on the switch) -- *if* you realize that you have misdialed it. Towards the end of the seventh hour, you probably won't. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Well, Richard Feynman was able to crack the safes at Los Alamos in a couple hours, and I assume they were of similar specifications. Not clear what tricks he used.

Some of these have all sorts of suicide devices in them, such as tempered glass plates that shatter when you drill in the wrong place, and totally jam the works. You then have to saw the entire door in half to get it open.

Jon

according to Feynman's book, these were padlocks, presumably the early Sargent and Greenleaf type - the later ones had some anti-tamper features but the earlier ones could be felt out, at least for a few numbers, limiting what you had to try. go to a surplus store and buy a bag of these locks, they are deprecated now.

No, they are rated on how long it takes an _expert_team_ with full knowledge of the internal construction and an assortment of tools (common hand tools for TL-15, add abrasive cutting wheels and power saws for TL-30) to gain entry. And, the time is "net working time," i.e., when the tool comes off the safe, the clock stops.

You can view a video of the testing of a Meilink Gibraltar TL-30 safe at

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Read Feynman's books - they are worth the time.

He noted the last number from inspecting open safes (actually "secure file cabinets" IIRC). It was a flaw in the design.

He found (IIRC without re-reading the book right now) that the numbers were not overly precise - so 100 numbers might really be 25-33 if running trials. This is a pretty common flaw of 100 number safe dials, at least on the lower end. If the spec says 100 numbers, they put on 100 numbers, but if the numbers are all off by one or two, the safe still opens...

He pointed both of these flaws out to security, which rather than fixing them, responded in typical idiotic fashion - at least until they needed him.

He also used the same tricks that any password cracker uses now - common numbers people might choose - anniversaries, children's birthdays, numbers scribbled on the desk drawers, etc.

And if he cracked one in 20 minutes, he made sure to read something for another couple of hours before opening the office door, so as to not make it look too easy.

For a safe you actually own, the correct way to computerize the process would be a robot dial-spinner - doesn't need to sleep and won't fudge up the numbers if it's built right. But you do need to know the correct directions to spin for that model of safe (no matter what you are using.) Just the thing for a spare servo (or stepper) motor and controller, plus a linear actuator or something for the handle part. Let it grind away until it pops, and figure some way to note when it pops so you save the right numbers. The you could re-run trials to see how wide the band of numbers that work is to figure what the center numbers (ie, the real combination) should be.

If making new combination locks now I suppose you might include some means of noting too much dial twiddling, but I guess the serious safes all went to time locks to deal with that problem anyway. Any safe you can pick up (with a forklift, if needed) is ultimately not all that serious, is it?

Among other things -- he knew the mindset of the individual people who set the combinations, so the number of tries was significantly reduced.

Things like a physicist being likely to use physical constants as combinations, mathemeticians likely to use "pi" and "e" as combinations, auto license plate numbers, dates of birth or marriage, names of spouses, kids, and pets and similar -- and they were not required to change them as often as later.

I know that we had to change them about every six months, and were in the habit of using words -- converted todigits by the telephone dial (ignoring 'Q' and 'Z'). There was always a phone near the safes, so this was a convenient way to do it.

Once, decades ago now, a sequence of three security file cabinets in one room was set to "howcum nobody toldme" or 46-92-86-(0),

66-26-39-(0), and 83-63-63-(0). This was making fun of a common phrase of one particular co-worker. :-)

Since we had nothing above "Secret", certainly not "Top Secret" or any of the crypto or nuclear secrets (at least in our area) and most was just "Confidential" or "FOUO" (For Official Use Only), we did not have anything this Draconian.

The closest to this is a couple of data encryption devices which I got at a hamfest (with the Medco keys for the locks), which was set up so you needed both keys to get to the bolts which kept in in the rather thick metal housing (one key for normal use, and the other for loading new encryption keys into it), and you had to spend a long time taking out a long fine-threaded screw. The first thing that happens as you start to back that screw out is a metal arm is lowered to short out the power to the CMOS RAM chip which kept the keys, so even if you got into it, you could not read the keys (and they would normally be changed in a week anyway. :-)

BTW -- for setting the encryption keys on a Wi-Fi device, I will type a fairly long paragraph, and then take a MD5 checksum of the paragraph and use *that* as the key. It is a good match for the maximum length of key the devices will accept. As an example, let me take *this* paragraph up to the colon:

And it comes out with "eab0d091f3856c6253db169628dac12f" as the key.

And for an example of how little a change makes how big a change, my editor in the test above always adds a newline to the end of the last line so I went into it to take off that with a different editor, and got "fa9482e83bfad920695d9022a561cc2a"

And convert it to a MS-DOS format (CR & LF at the end of each line) and it becomes: "76c2b9fccab610d5afa16ba685918b30".

Unix uses only a LF (line-feed) (which it calls a "newline" character at the end of each line, and older MacOS (pre OS-X which is really unix with a fancy GUI over it) used only a CR (Carriage Return) at the end of each line.

However, the changes don't matter, since you generate it *once*, and then type it into each system that needs it.

Enjoy, DoN.