Written by Jeromie Jackson Published on Thursday, 28 January 2010 19:05
I am obsessive compulsive when it comes to hobbies. I find an interest, get completely immersed in it, and then generally move on. Luckily this was not the case for my interests in information security! A great example is bass fishing. I went from enjoying simply pulling crankbaits through the water to melting my own plastic and creating my own creature molds to make plastic worms out of. Not too off-base, I did the same with lockpicking. I went out and bought a bench grinder, hacksaw blades, and utilized my existing belt sander to create my own lockpicks.
I have thus far made picks out of hacksaw blades, butter knives, and sawzall blades. The hacksaw blades work very well and were cheap to make. The butter knives I bought, cheap ones, did not seem to have adequate tinsel strength which resulted in the picks breaking off in the lock. The sawzall blades were fat and required grinding to thin the width of the shank out, but I liked the result a lot! I later made an electric lockpick out of a woman's razor.
Since then I've purchased a set of commercial lockpicks, a lockpick gun, a Dyno-Quick pick rake, and many books. I have noted that the type of metal makes a big difference in the feel of the pick. Much like the sensitivity difference between Fluorocarbon & Monofilament fishing lines, the qualities of the metal in the pick changes the feel. For raking I definitely prefer a softer metal- the Dyno & the sawzall blanks are my favorites for rakes. For single picking I prefer the commercial or hacksaw sets. I also noted in torque wrenches you obtain different sensitivity. I ground down an Allen wrench and love the high sensitivity of the device!
You can check out videos of how I made the picks here
Follow-me on Twitter and stay up-to-date with my latest shenanigans. I've acquired a RFID read/write device and plan on spending some quality time with it. I equally have been studying a good payload to drop-off during Red Team assessments. I'm currently working with either Netcat or Metasploit with various types of packing/compiling/encryption techniques to evade antivirus software.
