How Easy Is It To Bypass a Europrofile Lock Cylinder?

The vast majority of people have at least one Euro profile cylinder on their doors at home. They are used on pretty much every double glazed door in the country and have been since probably the late 80s, early 90s. But how secure are they? Well, in this blog, we’re going to investigate that a little bit.

There are 4 main ways that a euro profile cylinder gets compromised. It can be drilled, it can be picked, it can be bumped and it can be snapped.

I’m going to talk about picking first. What is lock picking? Well, basically it involves manipulating all the pins inside, such that they all line up as though there were key inside it, and then the lock will turn. It’s a non destructive method of gaining entry and because of that, it takes quite a long time to do.

And that’s one thing that burglars don’t have. So is it a problem for people? Do burglars use picking as a means of gaining entry? No, they don’t. If they did, there’s not a great deal that you could do about it because you’ve got to be able to put the key inside the lock. But it’s a very difficult skill to master and not many people can do it, so it’s not a problem as far as burglary is concerned.

The next method that I mentioned is drilling. Is drilling a problem? Again, not really, because drilling makes noise and attracts attention, and again, burglars don’t want to attract attention to what they’re doing. It can be used by certain types of locksmiths who will drill out the cylinder in order to gain entry. It does happen quite a lot in that respect, but of course, if you’ve called a locksmith out, it’s not a burglary situation. In all fairness, sometimes we use this method as well. What can be done about it? Certain types of cylinder, which conform to the TS007 3 star standard have hardened steel anti drill plates. So if you try and drill into it, your standard high speed steel drill, will just go round and round and not get very far.

Next on the list is bumping. This is quite clever trick. Again. It’s a non-destructive means of gaining entry, but again it’s not something that’s a huge problem because again it needs a fair bit of skill to do it. It involves is putting a blank key inside the lock and tapping it. This causes the pins inside to bump into the right position in much the same way as the Newton’s Cradle (the executive toy that has the ball bearings suspended on string and one taps through and it taps the other one.) It uses the same principle in terms of transference of kinetic energy. Does it work? Yes, I’ve done it is. It a problem? No, not really, because it’s takes an awful lot of skill to do.

The last means of gaining entry that I mentioned is snapping. Now this is probably the most common means used by burglars because it’s a very easy way of gaining entry. It is destructive, so you would be able to tell that it’s happened to you. What happens is that someone comes along with a pair of grips and snaps the cylinder. The part of the cylinder around the fixing screw is quite weak because there’s only a little bit of metal there holding the lock together. A burglar snaps the cylinder off and then manipulates the lock open. To get over this, a 3* cylinder is used. It has a little slot in front of the fixing point, so when the burglar exerts pressure, instead of snapping at the fixing point, it will snap at the slot. And once that part snapped off, there’s some spring loaded pins inside which fire into place and stop the lock being manipulated open.

So are europrofile cylinders secure? Basically yes, they are, the cheap ones, slightly less so, three star ones somewhat more so.

If you feel like your security could do with a makeover, contact us, via the Contact page, to arrange your free survey.