Hackers Cracked Flock's Camera Software and Showed How It Tracks Cars and People

While residents across the United States are tearing down Flock Safety cameras, one group of hackers went further: they didn't just pull a device off a pole over the road — they also copied nearly all of its contents. The files were handed over by a collective called stegan0gram to the outlet 404 Media and to the organization Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED. Both outlets conducted a joint analysis.

Flock had described its cameras as protected by on-device encryption. The hackers found, however, that the drive was split into partitions, some of which were not encrypted. In one of them, named “media,” they found the encryption key, which unlocked access to video and images of thousands of captured vehicles. The most sensitive storage remained inaccessible.

What the Camera Can Do

The device runs on a processor comparable to a mid-range smartphone, powered by Android, and launches about twenty apps developed in-house by Flock. When motion appears, the camera takes a burst of frames at different exposures — on average around 28 shots per vehicle, sometimes more than a hundred — crops out the useful fragments and sends them to the company's servers over the cellular network. The actual recognition of the plate, make and color happens there.

According to the recovered logs, over roughly 21 days the camera photographed about 50,200 cars and generated on the order of 1.6 million images. The key discovery: the software clearly detects not only license plates, bicycles and cars, but also people, recording their position in the frame and the confidence of the recognition. WIRED ran the extracted models against 27,321 short video clips — people turned up in eleven, all of them on motorcycles. The outlets found no signs of facial recognition, which is consistent with Flock's claims.

The plate recognition algorithm turned out to be “broad”: at times it mistook stickers, dealership frames and other graphics for license plates. In one case the system cut out an American-flag patch on a motorcyclist's bag as a “plate.”

Context and Reaction

Flock's national network, which lets thousands of agencies search across other people's cameras, has long been controversial. Earlier, 404 Media reported that local police were running searches on behalf of the immigration agency ICE even where that is prohibited, and that one Texas officer searched for a woman who had self-terminated a pregnancy.

Flock called the removal of the camera illegal and pointed to its vulnerability disclosure program, noting that it had received no reports from these researchers. The hackers themselves admit they fear an investigation, but are trying not to draw attention.

A curious detail: the logs showed that the camera was struggling with memory — more than 27,000 “no space left on device” errors and numerous reboots. Meanwhile, every couple of minutes the liveness-check service left an entry reading “Who's a good boy?!” (more than 12,000 such messages piled up), and on restart the system said goodbye with the phrase “A reboot was requested! ¡Adios Amigos!”.

Source: 404 Media