Hackers Took Apart a Flock Camera and Published Its Data

What the hackers took

A hacker collective calling itself stegan0gram says it removed a Flock Safety license-plate reader from above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED. The group also plans to publish how it obtained the camera's software.

The recovered material is far more detailed than earlier accounts of the hardware: thousands of videos and logs showing that the device captured about 1.6 million images of roughly 50,000 vehicles across 21 days of recorded activity.

One key unlocked the footage

Flock describes its cameras as protected by on-device encryption, and much of the most sensitive storage did remain encrypted. The hackers say they reached the camera's Android system and found two unencrypted partitions, named “vendor” and “media”. The second held an encryption key that unlocked a partition containing most of the videos and stills the camera had taken.

The device runs about 20 Flock-built apps handling motion detection, image capture, object classification, uploads and remote updates, on a processor comparable to those in midrange smartphones. When something moves into view, the camera fires a rapid burst of photos — a typical vehicle produced about 28, some more than 100 — then crops useful frames and sends them to Flock over cellular.

People are detected too

The software explicitly detects people, not only vehicles, plates and bicycles, recording where a person appears in a frame and how confident the model is. WIRED extracted the models from the camera and ran them against recovered footage: across 27,321 short clips they found people in 11, all riding motorcycles.

The plate detector also misfired. Bumper stickers, dealership frames and other graphics were sometimes cropped as if they were plates, including an American flag patch on a rider's saddlebag. WIRED and 404 Media found no evidence of face recognition beyond capabilities included by default in Android, and those did not appear to be enabled.

Reaction and context

Flock said in a statement that “the unauthorized removal and tampering of a Flock camera is illegal”, adding that it maintains a public vulnerability disclosure policy and received no report through it.

The logs show the camera struggling with storage: more than 27,000 “no space left on device” errors while saving full-resolution images, plus tens of thousands of related errors, crashes and reboots. A health check that ran about every two minutes logged “Who's a good boy?!” more than 12,000 times.

The breach lands amid a wider fight over Flock's national network, which lets agencies search one another's camera records. Several towns have dropped the cameras and some people have been arrested for tampering with them.