How I Rob Banks

Chapter 26Find a Safe Space

We have covered how to crack a safe, but where do you find one? They are not just lying around … right? Well, honestly, you will be shocked by how many safes you do find lying around.

On many occasions, I have been asked to gain access to sensitive information or valuable assets that were held in a safe. Often, I am not told where that safe is. Finding it may be part of the assessment, and ultimately, a lot of clients don't even expect me to get into their building, let alone find the asset they have tasked me with. Despite my having a 100% success rate (ridiculous but true), clients that want a social engineering or physical assessment generally assume they have finally built a secure site. They keep their cards to their chest and share barely anything with me. Why would they?

I have found safes in all sorts of weird and wonderful places. People think they are smart when hiding safes, but the truth is that most of us think in a similar way. That's why passwords are often easy to deduce, and it's why social engineering is—unfortunately—so easy to do.

When it comes to safes, there are really only a few places you can hide a large metal box. It's not going to be in a wall if the wall is four inches thick. It's unlikely to be installed in the floor if the office is not on the ground floor, because the floor is too thin or weak to hold a safe.

When you start to consider the limitations of where you can fit this heavy metal box, you also understand that ...