Yesterday I visited the German impression Championships in Cologne (Germany). But more about that later. For now I just am proud to be able to show you what Julian Hardt wants to share with you….

Julian worked on ‘comb picks’ for some time and created some pretty impressive ones….

For those new in the field: A comb pick is more a bypass tool then it is a pick. The whole idea of this tool is to lift the pins and lift them all the way up, out of the plug. If all pins are cramped up in the housing of the lock, there is nothing blocking the sheerline and the plug can rotate.

Besides creating comb picks for some of the more populair padlocks like Viro and Abus, he also made a comb pick for the Abus XP1 family. As some of you might know, the XP1 has a very difficult keyway. The pins are more or less trapped in the key profile, and if you want to pick it you have to approach them from the side. A very tricky and delicate lock. But Julian’s comb pick also is a piece of art!

Julian was honest enough to mention the comb did not seem to work on all models he tried. Sometimes the length of the top pin plus the bottom pin and the spring is just longer then the canal in the house of the lock. Still I really like the design and skills involved to make it…

I am sure the visitors of this humble weblog will enjoy this video (YouTube) showing you all about Julian’s comb picks (Quicktime video 45 MB).

Personally I am just very curious how long it will take the lock-tool industry to copy this concept and come out with a set of comb picks. I am putting my money on less then six months before the first ones show up on the market, maybe even sooner ….

Place your bets (in the comments) ….

Steffen is having some sort of blog too. On the internal pages of www.ssdev.org he writes nice German articles that are worth the read.

And trough a TV item on discovery channel he found out what ‘blackbag’ truly means. I must admit, the TV item he found is pretty neat! It shows a gentleman by the name of Mr. Ed Tickel, an FBI legend when it comes to opening locks. And in the video he demonstrates his favorite opening technique: impressioning!

And for those of you who wonder how NDE (non destructive entry) operators spend time on a lock in a busy street: He answers this in an amazing story on how he made a key to a lock while he was hiding in a big refrigerator box. Thinking about it, this makes a lot of sense. The hole in the box should not even be bigger then a hand, and if you are afraid evil mobsters will shoot trough the box, you can even have it armour plated….

One other retired FBI agent was a so called ‘wire man’. He was responsible for planting the microphones and camera’s. A job that nowadays would include the installation of keyloggers and knowledge on how to back up other peoples hard drives…

For more information, just google for ‘Operation Strawman’. Unfortunately there is not much background info I could find about Mr. Ed Tickle. And that is too bad because I would not mind inviting him as a speaker for the Dutch Open lockpick championships on 23/24/25 November 2007….

The full video with the interview can be found here (68 MB .AVI)

Yesterday I finally collected my MacBook pro. While I am still busy installing software on it, I could not resist to try out the video editing software. First attempt can be found here (Quicktime 15 MB).

And a couple of weeks ago Paul Crouwel and Rob Zomer organized a safe cracking weekend. People from all over the globe gathered at this ‘invitation only’ party to share knowledge on the holy grail of safe cracking. Some pretty serious safes were cracked by the attendees (like a GJ Arnheim, Rosengrens European, LIPS VS 80, Victor (build in +- 1910) a LIPS VAGO and so on).

Paul used this weekend to try out some of his new tools. Amongst them were some strongarm hardplate drill-bits, a mini drill rig that allows you to apply perfect drill tension and an ITL2000 safe combination dialing robot.

Especially the mini drill rig and strongarm drill bits came out real well. Before they got the drill rig, a more primitive (yet effective!) method of applying pressure to a drill was used.

One other tool that was used was a thermic lance. Pretty spectacular to see (and smell) in real life. (click on image to see quicktime video 18 MB, or here for youtube)

A lot of interesting discoveries were made over the weekend and we are currently working on an article for the Savta magazine to list some of them.

For us the biggest surprise was to find one of the safes still was filled with jewelry! Fortunately the owner of the safe was present and was happy to receive his goods back undamaged.

Just a few kilometers away from our party some other safe owner was much more unhappy. A jewelry shop in a black market hall was burglarized, and some extreme brute force was used. The thieves must have used a pretty hefty grinding wheel (diamond blade?) to cut a hole in the side of the safe. The sad thing was no insurance company could be found to insure the poor entrepreneur because of the location of the market. And the security guards responsible for the place received multiple alarm calls but never bothered to thoroughly investigate why the silent alarm kept going off. Very fishy if you ask me …

A news item (including Rob Zomer’s expertise) can be found here (Quicktime 15 MB) or on youtube.

It is a good thing all 15 of the ‘safe cracking weekend’ attendees have a solid alibi…

P.s. I am curious if you think quicktime video is prefered over my old Windows Media files …

Hey, you are still here reading my blog?

To be honest, blogging can be a big burden sometimes.

But the good news is: I am still alive. Over the past few days more and more people were worried about me not posting on this blog. And rumor has that some others were hoping for it to disappear from the face of the earth for ever. Too bad, blackbag is here to stay …

The thing is, so much is happening that it is hard to keep up. But here is a first attempt to work trough the pile of articles I have/had in stock.

Han’s booth at Aloa was a big success. A few serious lock manufacturers showed interest in Han’s products, engineering skills and his pool of knowledge. I would not be surprised if one of these companies makes Han an offer he can not refuse in the near future…

And I did scout some interesting stuff for you at Aloa! In the weeks to come I hope to make footage available of a mul-t-lock pick, some 13 song tools and big boys doing arm wrestling with Abus keychains.

One special guest at Han’s booth was Marc ‘I will kill you if you publish these pictures‘ Tobias. Marc was clearly in his element at Aloa, but only until he spilled one liter of soda on Han’s booth, ruining a big stack of flyers.

I am eagerly waiting for my new macbook pro. The idea is to have better video editing software and compress video in a more friendly video format then before (was win media 9). And there is quite some video to be edited. But please do not hold your breath, as work and family life are taking up a lot of my time ….

Yesterday Han and I landed in Charlotte, North-Carolina. For me the plan is to visit the Aloa 2007 exhibition while Han is having a booth there.

I have already seen lots of familiar faces and had quite some interesting conversations. If there are nice new tools or other novelties I will make sure to report back here.

Stay tuned ….

It took the lock-tool industry a couple of years to copy German Ssdev member Kurt Zuhlke’s invention. Kurt developed the reversible pick gun. His invention was mentioned in the bumpkey whitepaper we published at the beginning of 2005, and I have had many requests ever since from european locksmiths that wanted one.

The reason for that is so far all pick guns on the market were targeted to US locksmiths. In the US locks are mounted pins upward in the door while in europe it is the other way around and they are pointing downward.

The problem most european locksmiths have is that if they want to use a pickgun on a door, the handle of the door is in the way. That is because with a US model pickgun you have to keep the gun upside down to be able to use it.

But not anymore … now there is a solution! (for sale on the free market)

Brockhage has created a pickgun especially designed for the european market.
And it works! At home I managed to shoot open a nice range of locks, all in the upside down position.

A friendly locksmith that has been bugging me for a ‘kurt Zuhlke edition’ for a loooong time was glad to try it out too. And he liked it, eventough he could open locks faster and more reliable with his own ‘us version gun’. Not so strange if you keep into consideration he used his old one on a daily basis for over twenty years …

* update 08/2007 There is some discussion about how well this gun actually works. Some German lockpickers (who’s comments I respect highly) do not like the gun and it’s design at all. They called it names I will not repeat as this site. On the other hand, two locksmiths who open doors on a daily basis have reported they do use with success when their conventional pickgun can’t make the angle.

A few weeks ago we were asked to see how long it would take us to swap the ROM’s in a Nedap voting computer. The exact time would be needed in a German report from the Chaos Computer Club. They did research on voting computers and their vulnerabilities and came out with their analysis today.

In order for them to calculate how long an outsider would need to hack the elections they needed an estimate on how long it would take to swap the two ROM chips on a Nedap voting computer. The complete voting computer software is loaded from these two ROMs, and the person/entity installing the ROMs on these black box voting computers has complete power over the elections. There is no safeguard as there is no ‘paper trail’ and a recount is not possible.

If you want to know more details: recently a subtitled version of a Dutch TV item became available online for those interested in the situation in the Netherlands and our atempts to hack the Nedap’s. I think it gives a nice overview.

For us doing the ‘ROM swap job’ was a fun assignment. We stopped when setting the ‘record’ to one minute. One minute per machine is a nice statement and we decided not to push the limits any further.

And of course we backed up our 60 second claim with a video clip that will only take one minute of your valuable time (in Windows Media or on YouTube).

* Update June 10: The CCC report is getting extremely good press. Read the article from the prestigious ‘Der Spiegel’ magazine.

Last night I received a link to a blog called ‘locks and security’. The first thing that came to mind reading ‘locks and security’ is that it would have something to do with Marc Tobias, author of ‘locks, safes and security’. But Marc’s new informative weblog is called ‘the sidebar’.

This ‘locks and security’ weblog is clearly something else, but nevertheless a very good source of information. It shows the author’s drive for knowledge and passion to change normal locks into the lockpickers most desired object: the ‘cutaway lock’.

I really like the way he shares his thoughts on ‘plan of attack’ to certain locks and his great eye for detail. And to read he will phone fifteen different locksmiths trying to get his hand on a specific lock part for a fair price. Personally I would have tried to visit the shops instead of calling them. Although calling is a lot faster, having face to face conversations can be much more productive.

Reading ‘safe and security’ reminded me of ‘the good old days’ were I as a 16 year old kid visited most of the Amsterdam locksmiths. Asking countless questions, most of the time being thrown out of the shop without answer. However, if you just keep on trying, and learning from your mistakes, you will find someone who will recognize your talent and share your passion for locks. At age of sixteen I already made some friends with locksmiths that still are close friends and valuable contacts to this day.

As you might know by now Toool members like Han Fey and myself are pretty active writing papers and blog entries on high security locks and bypass techniques. But the fact you are here reading this probably means you know all this.

And when ever we publish something, whether it is about locks or opening methods, we always try to be as accurate as possible and come up with evidence of our claims. And I can tell you it takes lots and lots of time trying to be accurate.

One of the reason for us to want to be so accurate is that we know the complete lock industry is looking over our shoulder. Another reason is that it is directly linked to our name and reputation as we do not hide behind aliases. We are proud of what we write and take full responsibility and credits.

But maybe the most important reason to give full disclosure is to avoid not being taken serious and fueling up endless discussions and speculations about not the fully disclosed facts. In our opinion you either give full disclosure or you keep your mouth shut.

Some people have other standards. Take for instance a visitour of the Dutch Open 2006 hiding behind the initials PW.

On the item on this weblog about the RKS system he posted a comment, claiming he opened the RKS lock four times in five minutes. And stating that he is not going to tell us how he did it and wait for the lock to be released, “just like Toool always does” (?)

To me this was like someone was waving a red flag. A big one. But It tried to respond in a calm matter. It was no use.

What happened next is one of the most dark pages of my weblog. An old style flamewar followed, one with no winners.

The silly flamewar kept my mind busy for a long time, consuming lots of cycles that could have better be used doing other, more positive things.

Speaking about what was on my mind with some close friends, I came to the conclusion I will never be provoked to such a nasty flamewar ever again.

From now on I will only respond to online arguments if people back up their claim with as much technical details and facts as we do, preferably under their own name.

Last weeks/months I did spend a lot of time impressioning locks. I try to open at least one lock per day with this tecnique. And most of the time I succeed in that, and it is giving me quite a confident feeling.

But when I tried to open a relatively simple abus 5 pin cylinder that was mounted in a door, on a rainy day in the middle of the night, this confidence was nowhere to be found. Before you ask ‘why was Barry in the middle of the night trying to open a lock?’ … it was because the owner lost his key. To make a long story short, trying to open that lock became a disaster. And there is no one to blame but myself, except maybe the bad lighting conditions on the scene. I just could not see the marks.

So I went search for better light sources that could be used for impressioning ‘in the field’. A few weeks before the disastrous Abus adventure, someone pointed me out that a company called MBA (in the US) sold a special impressioning magnifier. At first I did not think much of it. After all, how good a tool can it be for just $29 US? And using the Velleman loupe on my desk I never had a real reason to look for better light and view anyway.

But now I needed something portable and started my search for the perfect ‘in the field’ impressioning aid. I tried out lots of lights and magnifiers. But not one could come close to the superb Velleman magnifier with it’s build in TL tube. The problem with all other light sources is that when you shine focused light on a blank you get blinded by the reflections. And all magnifiers with build in light I tested had some sort of focused spotbeam that was way too intense.

At around the same time Oli pointed out an aid used for examining gems. It is a simple detachable unit that fits a maglite flashlight. And inside is a filter to diffuse the light and a prism to create a nice indirect effect when looking at the object. The interesting thing is it showed great similarities to the MBA unit I ordered.

I guess there are the same, especially when I finally received them in the mail and could take a close look. I suspect MBA did modify the unit a bit to make it better suitable for examining long metal objects.

I must say I like the tool a lot. Light on the blank is the best I have seen so far for a portable unit. And the magnification of 10X is also very helpful.

Still there are some minor disadvantages. One of them is the short range where the blank is ‘in focus’ when looking trough the magnifier. It seems to require some skill to keep the blank at the right distance. But maybe this will change if you practise some with it. Another small disadvantage is that when you see marks on the blank they disappear from the naked eye when you remove the blank from the tool. This leaves you with the question where on the blanks the marks are you could see so clearly under the light. Adding some marks on the side of the blank (using a marker or make some scratch marks) will solve that problem. You only have to count at around what mark on the side of the blank you have to start filing.

Before I will attempt to open doors in the field again I will make very sure to be fully confident with this tool. And even tough I like this tool, the search for the ideal light is still on ….