Articles highlighting vulnerabilities within the supply chain, offering insights and solutions to strengthen cargo security and deter theft

image of generic bolt seals

Five Drawbacks to Using Bolt Seals

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Five Drawbacks to Using Bolt Seals and Why Cable Seals Are Better

Bolt seals gained popularity as a cheap and strong container seal option, and while their vulnerabilities were exposed 20+ years ago, they continue to be prevalent in the industry.

Here are the reasons we believe cable seals are superior from a security perspective.

  1. Interchangeable Parts: bolt seals have no standard for design, but because most of them are hat and pin, 90% are interchangeable. Tamperers can come prepared with duplicate parts.
  2. Duplicate Numbering: Most bolt seals are produced in Chinese factories that will print any seal number given to them by a company or individual. That means that there can be duplicate seal numbers from different companies, and tamperers embedded within the company can request and prepare duplicate bolts in advance just based on the subsequent numbers in a box. The bill of lading doesn’t specify if the bolt number should be on the hat and pin, just the hat, or what color the bolt should be for an upcoming shipment. We have witnessed several instances where containers with bolt seals were breached, and an extra seal was waiting inside the door to replace the tampered one.
  3. Easily Tampered: Bolts can be spun to release the pin from the hat. They can be cut and re-threaded, and they can be cut and re-glued using highly accessible and robust materials. The strength of the steel doesn’t serve as a true protection.
  4. No Tamper Evidence: There is no way to check for tampering. Square bolts or un-spinnable bolts can be cut and re-glued, and security personnel cannot discern if a bolt is un-spinnable or tampered and glued back together.
  5. Don’t Secure Two-Bar Containers: When a bolt is applied to the right door latch on a two-bar container (essentially a container with parallel bars – one or two on each door), the bolt must be applied to the latch on one side. The rivet securing the latch to the bar can be removed, the door opened, and the rivet secured back into place undetected. You’ll often even see a rivet replaced with a nut to make it easier to remove. However, a secure cable seal with a 1500mm cable can provide a more reliable solution for securing the bars of both left and right container doors without the risk of tampering.

Why choose cable seals?

No standard exists for producing, numbering, or verifying bolt seals, so parts get replaced frequently without leaving any signs of tampering.

Unspinnable bolts were introduced to the market as a more secure option. However, they can be difficult to distinguish from bolts cut, threaded, or glued back together, confusing security personnel working with multiple bolt seal styles. As a result, instead of checking for tampering, personnel often cut the bolt at the destination and move on.

We design our seals to resist all five common forms of tampering. Redflag seals cannot be easily or quickly duplicated in China and work on all types of containers. Our product range provides varying levels of oversight and security, allowing you to select the appropriate level of protection for your shipment and identify any vulnerabilities in your supply chain.

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intermodal railcars moving on train

Five Methods of Seal Tampering

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Five Methods of Seal Tampering and Why Seal Strength Won’t Protect Your Cargo.

In today’s global economy, supply chain security is essential. Unfortunately, tampering seals is the most prevalent way in which cargo is stollen or contraband is smuggled. In our previous post, we outlined why relying on ISO 17712-2015 certified seals is not enough to protect your cargo. Now, we’ll dive deeper into the five most common methods of seal tampering and give real-world examples of why cable strength won’t protect your containers.

We cannot stress enough that tampering is not just about opening a seal. It is about opening and closing the seal without detection. This leaves your cargo vulnerable at any point in the supply chain and leaves you blind to where and when theft, smuggling, and contraband occur.

Immutability in the physical flow of the supply chain is as essential as in the financial or information flows. If it does not exist in the material flow, supply chain integrity cannot be asserted. This also suboptimizes the role of other risk mitigation mechanisms such as NII or container inspections for example. Without tamper evidence, there is no anomaly detection and no way to understand where a problem in the supply chain occurred. No anomaly detection, no actionable intelligence. – Dan Garcia, Senior Analyst at SIMS World Wide

5 Methods of Seal Tampering

We will go over the five most common methods of seal tampering below. What may surprise you is that NONE of the following techniques require expensive tools, skills, or much time to implement. These techniques are simple and highly effective on the majority of seals, even ISO-certified seals.

  1. Ratcheting: The cable is twisted until it loosens and disengages from the internal locking mechanism.
  2. Picking: A thin steel cable is used to release the spring of the internal locking mechanism.Because most ISO-certified seals are tested for strength, seal manufacturers don’t typically put effort into concealing the locking mechanism or making it inaccessible.
  3. Sleeving: This technique is used when tamperers are unfamiliar with the location of the locking mechanism within the seal body. They wrap the cable in a layer of aluminum, usually from an old can, to block friction with the cable, release it from the mechanism, and then unwrap and re-insert.
  4. Freezing: Most railways have a fire board complete with a fire extinguisher. Most extinguishers are filled with pressurized CO2 rather than chemicals outside the US. Tamperers pour a small amount of water into the seal body and blast it with CO2 from the extinguisher, lowering the internal temperature to -76°C to the point where the water inside freezes the spring. The cable can then be removed without friction or pressure to trigger the locking mechanism.
  5. Changing the Cable:This technique uses force to ram through the opening of the cable. For ISO-certified seals, there is a minimum load strength specification of 10 kilonewtons, which means a steel cable between 3.2 and 3.5mm. The issue is that the aluminum seal body is softer than the steel cable which allows the tamperer to use the strength of the cable to release the cable from the seal body.

How are Redflag seals different?

With over 20 years of on-the-ground experience and insight, we anticipate weak points in the supply chain and design our seals to surpass ISO standards and remain secure. Our seals utilize innovative design and undergo independent testing at Dayton T. Brown, Inc. Laboratories to resist all 5 of these common forms of seal tampering.

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