Thursday 5 February 2009

Finding the weak spots … our office was broken into

Apparently the lock on the front door was not a very good one. The folks that broke in used a pair of Vice-Grips to literally twist off the lock cylinder.

We were fortunate that everything in the front office area, which is quite small area wise, was relatively safe from a dine and dash like this.

They did, however, make off with the old iMac! But, they somehow forgot the keyboard and mouse as well as the second 19” wide LCD monitor that was sitting beside it. There is some justice in that! ;)

The R.C.M.P. officer in charge of the investigation said that our alarm, which is really really loud, probably scared them off.

Anyone see the irony (yesterday’s post) in this? ;)

We were very fortunate as the situation could have been a lot worse.

Our shop area is the largest part of our space here, and it is protected by heavy gauge doors along with pinned hinges and a pair of strategically placed deadbolts on each door. The server room is protected even further. So, they did not manage to get into the back or even see what was going on back there.

A valuable lesson has been learned here for us. We need to make sure the lock smith that will be here this afternoon is going to install a very good lock that cannot be defeated by a pair of vice-grips.

While no lock is perfect, just search out “bump keying”, having a lock that will prevent some of the easier methods for getting into our shop is a good start.

We will also look into some security film for the glass on that door too. It does not hurt to have another layer of security.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Been they it sucks

we got broken one night replace window the next day came back smash brand new window it sucks lose of stuff


Andy Asselin

a few grand later

don,nt you just want kill them : >

Mike said...

Sorry for your loss, but I have to say... I learn SO MUCH from you! Never heard of bump locks till now. Amazingly simple / scary. Great story to tell to help make sure clients keep backups!

Jozef Izso said...

I hope I'll get your iMac back. We had similar robbery in our office and thief took one iMac with tracking software installed. We managed to cooperate with police and the iMac was taken to custody by police in less than a week. Unfortunately it's still at the police station for several weeks :(