Our friends at Unleashed Tactical Equipment spend a lot of time on the road, just like our readers and they are concerned with the all-too-common breakins that are occurring in hotel rooms due to vulnerable electronic locks. For you road warriors, they offer this advice.
It’s seems to be making the rounds in the press this past few weeks that there’s a security issue with certain hotel room electronic key locks. We can confirm that the issue is real and the room door locks can be bypassed using a few low cost pieces of electronic trickery.
We’ve been aware of this for some time, years in fact, so we thought we’d offer up this simple suggestion against a potential surge in room break ins.
When you first enter your electronically secured hotel room take a good look at the outside (hallway) side of the door lock. At the bottom of the underside of the door lock (facing the floor) you may find a round hole approx 5mm in diameter. This is the access point used to bypass the room electronic security.
You need to plug this hole using anything to hand. I tend to use a strip of paper torn from the room stationery, formed into a tight , interference fit, roll that is then pushed into the hole. The roll of paper will gradually unravel and fill the orifice. This technique is non destructive and can be relatively easily removed by hotel maintenance staff.
Assuming someone does access your hotel room, always use the hotel or room strong box. If you don’t, your insurance probably won’t pay out.
Sleep easy.
Team UTE
