Failures in basic security that led to huge losses

Online data breaches may dominate headlines, but for many, it's still the old-fashioned physical break-in that's the biggest concern.

A study by Sandia National Laboratories examined 23 of the world's most infamous thefts and drew a surprising conclusion. It found that at the core, failures in basic security were what led to huge losses. Here are the common slip-ups:

Keyed locks

In almost half of the cases, the thieves were able to overcome locks — the most common method being threatening someone who had the key. In the 2003 Antwerp Diamond Center theft, a criminal posed as a tenant for two years to perform reconnaissance.

Unarmed guards

In the same percentage of cases, the criminals were able to defeat unarmed guards, often using non-violent deception. In the 2004 theft worth more than $70 million at London's Heathrow Airport, criminals driving a delivery van passed through a security gate with paperwork forged with the help of an insider.

Cameras

Thirty per cent of the incidents involved defeating security-camera systems. In the 1983 armed heist of a Brink's-MAT warehouse (also at Heathrow), employees were doused with gasoline and threatened with a lit match to open the vault. An insider was responsible for monitoring the security camera images at the time of the robbery.