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Safe-Cracking Robot Unveiled As Criminal's Best Friend

Fine jewellery to fund the world robopocalypse.

You would think that a safe is just about the last haven on Earth that’s safe from hackers, well you’d be wrong.

A team from the electronics company SparkFun in the US have just unveiled their very own robotic criminal mastermind that can crack open a safe all on its own.

The remarkable creation had its debut at the DEF CON conference in Las Vegas where the world’s greatest hackers, cybersecurity researchers and technology experts gather to discuss the advances in technology and the dangers that we then face alongside them.

Before you start running to go grab everything out of your safe there are two things you should probably know.

Firstly, it took the robot a good 30mins to crack the safe and secondly the team at SparkFun aren’t criminals, in fact they seem like really nice human beings.

That being said they wanted to show how easy it was to create a safe-cracking robot.

Using just $200 worth of off-the-shelf components and a tiny micro-computer the robot was able to reduce the possible combinations of this particular safe from 1 million down to 1000.

The robot then systematically worked its way through the remaining 1000 combinations until it found the right one.

The SparkFun team had originally trialled their robot on a smaller safe which they then showed to Wired.

Wired then reached out to the sake maker which gave out a statement saying that, ”[It] would be realistically very difficult, if not impossible, for the average person to replicate in the field.”

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