Don’t go cheap on garage door security
Reducing the amount of money that you spend on your home sometimes involves cutting corners on unessential items or features of the home that aren’t important to you and your family. Since the garage is one of the areas of the home that people consider the least, it tends to be a candidate for people to go cheap on the construction of this part of their home.
The garage door is one of the first lines of defense for your home and should be considered as important as the quality of your front door. When you install a cheap garage door and garage door opener, you’re much more likely to be targeted by thieves looking for homes that present an easy break-and-enter target.
Home burglary trends and patterns
Similar to other types of crime, home burglary tends to take place according to patterns that homeowners can learn from to protect their home. According to Detective Kevin Coffey, dubbed ‘The Scholar of Thievery’, “most criminals who burglarize homes are looking for an easy hit; a house that they can break into quickly, take something of value, and leave without being detected.” As such, thieves aren’t looking for a challenge when they’re casing neighborhoods for a quick score.
Typically, thieves will look to infiltrate your home on the first floor or ground floor, and they are much more likely to do so during daytime hours when people are the least likely to be home. Households with two occupants are the most likely to be targeted, and the majority of criminals will not spend longer than a minute breaking in. Once inside, they usually spend five minutes at most going through the property, searching for valuables to steal.
Interestingly, the second most common entry point for burglaries is the garage door – only the rear door is more frequently used for illicit entry. Considering that criminals seek an easy in, it’s telling that the garage door is one of the most popular weaknesses for burglars to exploit.
Cheap seals are easy to break
Homeowners going cheap on their garage doors have led to considerable opportunities for burglars who are adept at spotting easy marks. One of many methods used to enter a residence illegally is to open the garage door using a simple coat hanger. How? From the outside, the open wire of a hanger is slipped through the top panel and used to hook the red emergency release cord of the door opener. The real purpose of this safety feature is to allow you to open the garage door from the inside when the automatic door opener doesn’t work. Unfortunately, several YouTube videos have surfaced recently showing how relatively easy it is for a criminal to slip a clothes hanger in at the top of door to disengage the emergency release.
After the wire is poked through, the emergency release lever may be activated, which is a safety feature that’s designed to prevent people from getting trapped under the door or inside the garage. When the release is triggered, the thief can simply lift the door, giving themselves access to the garage and the rest of the home.
Cheap remote openers are easy to hack
Another aspect of your garage that you shouldn’t skimp on is the remote opener, which provides another easy target for thieves to gain easy access to your home. Security researcher Samy Kamkar revealed that he found a way to hack into a garage’s remote opener using an old, discontinued text messaging toy called the IM-ME.
He rigged this toy to cycle through all the possible opening codes, attaching an antenna to enable the device to transmit all the possible opening codes that a garage door may use. Within less than a minute, he could transmit all the possible codes using four different frequencies.
Samy was able to exploit cheap remote openers that use a fixed code instead of a rolling code system. A rolling code system changes the correct, two-digit opening code when it receives an incorrect signal, while a fixed code system doesn’t change the code at all, allowing a thief to cycle through all the possible codes quickly to open the door from afar.
He found that this particular problem was so prevalent that his L.A. condo garage succumbed to this attack, despite the fact that the building was a relatively new construction. If you decide to save a little bit of money by getting a cheap remote opener that uses a fixed code, you expose yourself to this remote garage door hack.
Cheap garage door openers aren’t safe either
There’s no good reason to expose your home to an increased risk of break-in just to save a little bit of cash on your garage door. When you’re considering a new door and opener, make sure that the system you buy seals the door well and uses a rolling code opener.
Get a free quote today, or start by building your perfect garage door! You can also call us at 1-877-828-5279.
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