How I Rob Banks

Chapter 10How to Use a Pen to Hack Any Door

This is a short recap of a test, not because nothing happened—several remarkably interesting things happened during the assessment—but because I can't talk about those incidents in public. It is the curse of someone who does this job. You often do a thousand mind-boggling things, but for security reasons, you can never talk about them.

What I can tell you about is a technique I often use to gain access to locked doors that are infrequently opened. Infrequently used doors are a bane to a social engineer and physical intrusion professional like me. To perform tailgating, you need to be able to reliably work out when and where a door will be opened. Frequently accessed doors are perfect for that type of attack. The converse are never-used doors; that type allows time to perform other attacks such as lock picking or bypassing the security system, maybe even destructively (if that's within scope) without fear of being seen or heard. But infrequently used doors are the worst. They aren't used often enough to tailgate, but they are used too often to pick, hack, or open with brute force.

What makes this type of door more difficult is that it often has a magnetic lock system rather than, say, a normal key lock.

This is where I can use my pen to bypass the locking system. It may seem that a pen cannot defeat a decent security system, but almost all security doors can be bypassed using this method.

The beauty of this technique is that you can ...