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Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

I would really hope that people who make security tools would have the best-of-breed electronic engineers but clearly not. The crack was pretty rudimentary and would take an experienced electronics test technician about an hour by the looks of it.

"No response". Understandable when you don't have any way to easily put it right, although I suppose they could have at least asked OP to keep it a secret until they could rectify it.

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These are really just fire safes. They’re made to protect important documents from being destroyed in the amount of time it takes a fire truck to put your house fire out. The lock is mostly to keep kids or guests out.

The biggest security vulnerability in these “safes” is not the lock. It’s that a thief can simply pick it up and walk away with it.

All this. I feel like people are not understanding that this is not meant to be a secure safe or even a deterrent. It is a home safe designed to keep valuables minimally safe from an average fire, with a side benefit of also preventing a toddler from swallowing your pearls. That's it.

Well, many people bolt their safe to their house. That adds some time for the thief to abscond with it. But I don't think "not meant to be secure anyway" is an excuse for "designed with a trivial security flaw." I mean, am I still supposed to trust what the manufacturer says about its fire resistance?

Most small desktop fire safes, like the one in this post, don’t have the provisions to do that unless you modify them.

These safes usually have a rating to be resistant to fire, but they usually lack any burglary-resistance ratings.

Burglary rated safes are expensive. They’re more expensive than the crap most homeowners want to put inside of their safe.

I mean, to be fair this is the sort of safe you find in a hotel room where it's expected that the staff have access to it. It's decidedly _not_ a high-threat environment secure item.

As a kid on family vacation we had a hotel room with a safe. Turned out to be usable as a toy for my brother and me. One of us setting a code, the other trying to guess it. Until the one of us setting it failed to remeber it.

Turned out the hotel had no problem opening it at all.

Electronic safes are anathema. It will take someone at least a few more minutes with their angle grinder to open mine.

What do people expect when buying a mostly plastic safe?

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