Dean’s Ultimate Explorer Tool

Dean recently published on his blog (& YouTube.com) instructions for making your own handy under-the-door-tool (watch the video if you are not sure what that is). While information about these tools have been around for a while (for example, check out Hans Conkel’s book on Amazon: How To Open Locks With Improvised Tools) it’s ready availability on sights such as YouTube and the Make Magazine Blog are pushing this information out into the public like never before.

How do you defend against this sort of attack? Well since reverting back to round knobs is not really an option (due to ADA regulations) you might possibly try to mount the door handle facing straight down (as is suggested in one of Dean’s subsequent blog entries). However even if the door hardware made this change possible, this strategy could be easily defeated with a variation of the same tool. You could also look at limiting the gaps around doors to make using such tools more difficult (however, doors tend to sag over time making this difficult to maintain). Therefore it is critically important that you always design your security plan to defend against a single point of failure. Incorporating additional elements such as alarms and CCTV, which depend on radically different technologies than locks and doors, won’t suffer from the same weaknesses as these other security devices. Of course, even these technologies can sometimes also be bypassed or defeated, but having to remove multiple layers of defense greatly increases the difficulty in executing a non-destructive entry.