Hardware hacking: The brute force approach

[unixronin]

In this case, the hardware in question is a York-branded, Diebold-manufactured safe of unknown provenance.  It was given to us when we lived in Tracy, CA, on the understanding that if we managed to get it open, we were to make a best effort to return any important-looking documents it proved to contain to their owners, and anything else we found was ours.

Well, we finally tired of trying to crack it today, upon being told that there was a good likelihood the shear pin on the unlocking shaft was sheared, and with the assistance of databeast and love_is_syn, we went in the hard way through the back.  Which, well, wasn't as hard as it might have been, because this thing turns out to be a really crappy safe. The sides are two layers of maybe-16-gauge sheet metal with an inch and a half of refractory cement and a layer of chicken wire in between.  (I'm serious.  Chicken wire.)  Purely a fire safe, not intended to be secure against more than casual intrusion attempts at all.  It probably only took us about an hour to get in, and only took us that long because we were still trying to do it as non-destructively as possible, up until the point at which we realized that even the inner shell (which I'd expected to be, oh, say, seam-welded quarter-inch cold-rolled plate) was just a spot-welded box of bent sheetmetal scarcely heavier than a tin can.  At that point, we said "Naff this" and went for the holesaw and the tinsnips.

And it contained ... wait for it ... a shelf.

Oh, and shelf clips!  Don't forget the shelf clips!

Bit anticlimactic, really.  And we've been hauling this thing around for seven years.  I mean, there could at least have been, say, a pile of WaMu stock certificates in there, or maybe a pair of Marilyn Monroe's underwear.  (Well, actually, that would probably fetch good money from the right buyer.)

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Uh ... it had three holes in it by the time we finished, but none of them projectile holes. Too close to other houses.