> All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO.
Sometimes not even. As a semi-related personal story, many years ago in university some friends and I set out to reverse-engineer the master keys.
All it took was buying 10x of the same blank from an online retailer for ~$12, cutting 6/7 positions to the same dephs of our dorm keys, then iterating the last remaining position down one depth at a time (starting from a 0-cut) in the last remaining position.
Rinse and repeat until we had iterated all 7 positions across our 7 sacrificial blanks, and with a little napkin math, we were left with the bitting for the TMK. Cut the TMK bitting onto a new blank, and we now had the literal keys to the kingdom.
Many harmless fun times were had, steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored, but had we been actually malicious the potential for damage or theft would have been huge.
I think those with the skills and smarts to perform sophisticated attacks typically set their sights higher in life than petty burglary, with most actual burglars resorting to more simple means like brute-force and violence.
I'd be very surprised if these burglars picked locks on the mailboxes or duplicated postal keys instead of having found some dumb bypass born due to a simple oversight in the mailbox's design.
Most of those should be explicitly open anyway. If a steam tunnel isn't safe for a few students to be in maintenance should need extra training to enter it as well. Roofs are too valuable spaces to make off limits (this is a rant should apply to all flat-top buildings). A penthouse might be a private space if so stay out, but many of them serve public functions at a university and should be open.
In the real world if urban colleges leave those spaces unlocked then random people who aren't even students will use them to sleep or get high. Have some sympathy for the maintenance staff who just want to do their jobs and keep the campus running without a lot of hassle.
Sometimes not even. As a semi-related personal story, many years ago in university some friends and I set out to reverse-engineer the master keys.
All it took was buying 10x of the same blank from an online retailer for ~$12, cutting 6/7 positions to the same dephs of our dorm keys, then iterating the last remaining position down one depth at a time (starting from a 0-cut) in the last remaining position.
Rinse and repeat until we had iterated all 7 positions across our 7 sacrificial blanks, and with a little napkin math, we were left with the bitting for the TMK. Cut the TMK bitting onto a new blank, and we now had the literal keys to the kingdom.
Many harmless fun times were had, steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored, but had we been actually malicious the potential for damage or theft would have been huge.
I think those with the skills and smarts to perform sophisticated attacks typically set their sights higher in life than petty burglary, with most actual burglars resorting to more simple means like brute-force and violence.
I'd be very surprised if these burglars picked locks on the mailboxes or duplicated postal keys instead of having found some dumb bypass born due to a simple oversight in the mailbox's design.