Target Hardening

Target hardening is the practice of making your home, your vehicle, or your person enough trouble to be worth skipping, so an offender chooses a different target.

Also known as: hardening the target

Why target hardening works

Most property crime is a selection process before it is a crime. An offender reads a row of houses, weighs effort against reward against the odds of being seen, and picks the easiest one. Target hardening moves you off the top of that list.

The concept matters because you are rarely defending against someone who has chosen you specifically. You are competing with the other houses on the street. A locked door, a motion light over the side gate, and a car in the driveway all raise the cost of picking your home over the one three doors down. Trimming the hedge that hides your front window does the same. None of it makes a house impossible to enter. What it does is make a house not worth the extra two minutes, which is the decision an offender is actually making. An offender quits when the effort stacks up rather than when one obstacle proves unbeatable, so give yourself four small deterrents before you buy one big one.

The deeper value is that target hardening pairs with OPSEC to cover both halves of the problem. OPSEC keeps you off the list by keeping your supplies and plans quiet. Hardening keeps you off the list by making the approach expensive. The same thinking scales down to your person, where the gray man principle hardens how you look in a crowd. It scales out to your accounts too. There, MFA raises the cost for a threat actor the way a deadbolt raises it for a burglar.

Hardening your home

• Lock every time. Doors and windows, including during the day, when most break-ins happen.
• Remove the cover. Tall hedges and dark corners at entry points give an offender somewhere to work unseen.
• Light the approach. Motion lighting and visible cameras where someone could reach a door without being observed.
• Keep it looking lived in. Varied light timers, collected mail, and a car in the driveway all read as occupied.