The only thing the deadbolts did was to make us replace three extra windows.
http://ct.gov/dds/lib/dds/safety/door_locking_arrangements.p...
[1] Big dogs are not afraid, thus they sleep at night if not properly trained. Small dogs (especially Yorkshires) are the most bad-ass security system I've encountered. They bark on anything alive that comes into 0.5miles circumference.
Which means you get so many false positives that you quit taking them seriously.
Sit on the couch? Bark.
Stand up from the couch? Bark.
Phone rings? Bark.
Television channel changes? Bark.
Doorbell rings? BARKBARKBARKBARKBARKBARKYOURHEADASPLODE!
In order to gauge the severity of any potential threat, you have to time the barking interval. If it lasts longer than three minutes, there may be armed men outside your door. Or they have to pee. So when you open the door to let them out, the thugs can enter.
Properly calibrating your dog is important.
Pit Bulls are terriers, and one reason they are so popular for lower-income city-dwellers is the manageable danger they present to unauthorized, non-packmate intruders in their range. You do not burgle a house with a Pit Bull or Staffordshire in it, period. And you think twice or thrice for any other type of dog. The fences, warning signs, food, vets, and boarding are very often cheaper in the long run than professional alarm system monitoring or contents replacement insurance.
Your garage. Such attacks can be done remotely, sitting in your car. You can open the garage door; hang around for a while, and then casually saunter in. But an attack on the front door requires physical presence at the door, and hence easier to detect.
Oh, and deadbolts are pretty easy to pick.
The locks did.. nothing. The thieves simply kicked the doors until they splintered at the lock. In fact, one door even snapped clean in half, so it ended up looking like a stable door, with a lower bit no longer attached to the lock which was now opening freely.
I'd wager it took them a similar amount of time to do this as picking a lock would have taken for someone experienced, and with far less training.
It taught me a very practical lesson about security. You can spend a lot of energy engineering the perfect lock, but always be aware that there will likely be obvious (once they've happened at least), perhaps very course, hacks which make that brilliant lock totally redundant.
The parallels to software security are obvious. To loosely quote Richard Campbell, it doesn't matter how strong your password is, if a truly determined bad guy wants to get at your data, they'll just use a wrench ;-)
That's fine, though. If you make the lock on your front door more secure, the weak point is now the latching mechanism, the door frame, or the door itself. Or perhaps it is your sliding patio door, that can be levered. Maybe you left a window unlocked. Or your garage door has a code that can be MITM'ed or brute forced.
The thing that saves most people is that there is really nothing worth stealing in their house. If a fence pays 10% of retail for stolen goods, I'm not certain there is any single thing in my home worth more than $25 to a burglar, other than the emergency cash. Rather than take the TV or any of the decade-old cap-rot Dell computers that have been re-capped, someone would be better off stealing all the meat out of the fridge, because at least they can eat that.
Agreed. I lived in a houseshare a couple of years ago where the housemates didn't want to chip in for contents insurance.
At first I was shocked, and thought about paying the whole house premium myself, but then I actually thought about it properly for the first time and realised that the sheer difficulty of removing and reselling my mostly quite heavy valuables (things like TV, drumkit, etc) and finding/sorting though even the smaller ones scattered around the place, would mean that any burglar that did get in would probably just decide to leave it. It wouldn't be worth the risk, effort, or arguably even their time.
I've not thought twice about contents insurance since. It's probably a product that makes no sense for a significant proportion of people (when you're renting and damage to furniture/appliances etc is covered by the landlord's insurance, of course!).
Abandoned premises are a whole other thing. If the burglar has no worry that the occupants will return, they may try for more ambitious scores, such as removing the copper water pipes or condenser coils, or ripping up floors, walls, and ceilings looking for hidden caches.
2-sided Abloy Protec 2 elite, locking-thumb-turn deadbolt on a metal door with a metal frame.
I expect an automated garage door opener is much easier to use than a lock pick though, and probably easier to produce and distribute than lock picks. So I shouldn't consider garages as secure.