Caught a customer's kid bypassing a panel with a paperclip yesterday

I was finishing up a install at a house over in Oak Park and the 12 year old son walks up, pulls a paperclip out of his pocket, and pops the cover off the keypad to jump the tamper. Said he watched a YouTube video on how to do it. The dad thought it was funny until I showed him how that trick also works on a lot of older systems with no encrypted zones. Makes me wonder how many of these DIY panels people are buying that their kids can just mess with. Anybody else run into this kind of thing with unsupervised kids or curious homeowners?

3 comments

3 Comments

andrew_baker95d ago

...and honestly the kid probably knew more about the system than the dad did. That's the scary part. People slap these cheap panels on their walls thinking they're safe but half of them have the same default passwords or zero protection against stuff like this. I've seen grown adults do the same thing with a magnet on a window sensor, just because they got tired of the alarm going off. The paperclip trick is older than YouTube, it's just more people know about it now. If I were you I'd push that customer to upgrade to at least a panel that encrypts the sensor zones, otherwise that paperclip will work on his new system too.

henryr455d ago

That paperclip trick goes back to the 90s at least @andrew_baker9... I knew a guy who bypassed a whole house alarm with a bobby pin and a piece of wire in like 30 seconds. Scary part is most of these newer IoT panels still use the same unencrypted 2-wire zones that have been around forever. Until manufacturers start shipping panels with encrypted sensors as the default, this stuff is just gonna keep happening.

david_palmer5d ago

Scary part is most of these newer IoT panels still use the same unencrypted 2-wire zones" - man that's rough to hear.