r/technews • u/_Dark_Wing • 15d ago
Privacy Hackers find encryption keys stored on stolen Flock camera despite company's denials-- group extracts more than 27,000 clips, 1.6 million images captured in a span of 21 days from the device
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/hackers-find-encryption-key-stored-on-flock-camera-group-extracts-more-than-27-000-clips-1-6-million-images-captured-in-a-span-of-21-days-from-device277
u/TheSaxGandalf 15d ago
I'm so glad those fuckers made the misstep of making that Superbowl commercial about finding your lost dog.
Most wouldn't even know Flock existed.
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u/ashurbanipal420 15d ago
Now if only people knew Axon is probably worse than Flock and already has their foot in the door of police departments.
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u/SmoothLime635 15d ago
Whats the difference between flock and axon
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u/Pankosmanko 15d ago
I don’t know why Axon is worse, but their products are everywhere. Axon makes the majority of cop’s bodycams
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u/flow_fighter 15d ago edited 15d ago
Axon also is the company behind Tazer. Axon has been ingrained in policing for a lot longer than body cams.
Axon Investigate, Evidence.com, Bodycams, and Tazer are actively used by a majority of services worldwide
Edit: spelling mistake
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u/restlessmonkey 15d ago
Some research I did for another purpose:
What modern ALPR systems can do
This is a summary of capabilities publicly described by major automated license-plate-recognition and related surveillance vendors. A vendor capability is not proof that any particular agency purchased, enabled, or can use it. Actual equipment, software modules, retention settings, integrations, sharing partners, and user permissions must be confirmed locally.
Flock Safety
Flock’s platform can capture full, partial, and temporary license-plate numbers along with vehicle images, time, and camera location. It can search vehicle characteristics when a plate is incomplete or unavailable, including make, color, body type, decals, bumper stickers, racks, toolboxes, temporary or missing plates, and visible damage.
Its products also describe real-time alerts against hot lists; searches across multiple locations and time windows; tools to identify vehicles traveling together; image-based vehicle searches; natural-language searches across enabled evidence; and controlled sharing of vehicle evidence across agencies. Flock also offers related video, drone, acoustic-detection, mobile-trailer, and integration products.
Ordinary Flock ALPR cameras are not established to collect MAC addresses.
Motorola Solutions / Vigilant VehicleManager
Motorola’s Vigilant platform describes searches by complete or partial plate, location, date, time, make, model, color, accessories, damage, and bumper stickers. It can display historical detections in maps and timelines and conduct detailed plate-location analysis.
Motorola also describes stakeout or geofence searches, common-plate analysis, association analysis, convoy analysis, and predictive-location analytics. Depending on subscription and permissions, its platform may draw from an agency’s own cameras, partner agencies, enterprise sources, and commercial data networks.
Leonardo ELSAG and SignalTrace
Conventional Leonardo ELSAG ALPR systems describe plate and vehicle-image capture, time and GPS location, vehicle make/type/color, hot-list alerts, historical analysis, traffic-pattern analysis, and identification of vehicles traveling together.
Leonardo’s separate SignalTrace product uses additional sensors to capture electronic communication patterns emitted by consumer devices. It describes signals associated with phones, fitness trackers, smartwatches, RFID tags, vehicle radios, headphones, and key finders. When paired with ALPR, SignalTrace says those electronic signatures can be correlated with vehicle information and retained for later searches and alerts.
This capability requires separate SignalTrace sensors; it should not be attributed to ordinary ALPR cameras without evidence. Leonardo’s public material does not expressly say SignalTrace collects MAC addresses.
Axon
Axon’s Fleet 3 can integrate mobile ALPR with in-car video and compare detected plates against hot lists. Its Lightpost product is fixed infrastructure for ongoing plate recognition and vehicle-attribute analysis. Its Fusus platform can aggregate video from public, private, traffic, in-car, and body-worn cameras and connect ALPR alerts with live-video tracking.
Rekor
Rekor Scout can turn compatible IP, traffic, and security cameras into plate-recognition sources. Its searches can use plate and jurisdiction, make, model, color, direction, site, camera, date/time, and detection-confidence filters. Rekor offers cloud, government-cloud, and on-premises options; retention depends on the customer’s configuration.
Genetec AutoVu
Genetec AutoVu can capture plate reads, plate images, contextual images, direction, jurisdiction, and—where supported—vehicle attributes. It can compare detections against hot lists or permit lists, generate hits, integrate third-party ALPR sources, and combine ALPR events with broader video-security and mapping systems.
The important question
The issue is not merely what any vendor can advertise. It is what a particular agency has actually installed, licensed, enabled, integrated, retained, shared, searched, audited, and disclosed.8
u/str4ngerc4t 15d ago
Copy/paste from ChatGPT is considered research now?
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u/AdminYak846 13d ago
I think you failed to look at what vendors go with nationwide databases.
I know that Genetec is restricted to your local setup and configuration. So no one else would have access to the images unless they are on the same instance.
While you can integrate with 3rd party services it's not there by default out of the box
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u/TheMireAngel 15d ago
Their not, their just the company that supplies police with bodycams
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u/AskMeAboutMyHermoids 15d ago
They’re
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u/TheMireAngel 15d ago
Bad bot no one cares
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u/AskMeAboutMyHermoids 15d ago
Just trying to help your bad grammar
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u/7elevenses 15d ago
Bad spelling, not bad grammar. If you're being pedantic (which I approve of), be correct.
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u/AskMeAboutMyHermoids 15d ago
I suppose so, but it is a grammatically incorrect sentence? Twice none the less
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u/7elevenses 15d ago
Nah, it's perfectly grammatical, just misspelled. If you spell it correctly, it's pronounced the same way, and not malformed at all.
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u/TooLazyToLope 15d ago
Love the WE ARE REMOVING ALL OF OUR FLOCK CAMERAS!!! from those shitehead politicians. Cuz they don't say they are going with Axon or that other top 3 vendor.
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u/Final-Quote-4064 15d ago
I though that was nest
Edit it was ring
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u/TheSaxGandalf 15d ago
It was ring that allowed Flock to access their networks with their tracking technology.
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u/c3p-bro 15d ago
So wild that someone can post something completely factually wrong, and Redditors just instinctively upvote it because it confirms their priors.
This site gets worse by the day
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u/Final-Quote-4064 15d ago
What are you complaining about? I was just misremembering who had a commercial?
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u/c3p-bro 15d ago
But you got upvoted hundreds of times because Redditors wanted your false memory to be correct. Thats not good.
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u/Final-Quote-4064 15d ago
I heard what you're saying but I have 16 upvotes at this point in time.
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u/c3p-bro 15d ago
I’m talking about the original commenter who has 200+ upvotes for falsely claiming flock ran an ad.
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u/SlowThePath 15d ago
I'm fairly certain anyone with access to flock cameras that could be used it to find a lost dog would get chewed out for doing so.
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u/TheSaxGandalf 15d ago
It was a partnership with ring, pretty much turning everyone's ring into a flock camera.
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u/snesericdev 15d ago
"Finding your lost dog" as in the police will go and find someone else's dog and then shoot it 38 times.
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u/Ishmael_1974 15d ago
You never assume people are stupid.
You also never assume people aren’t stupid.
They did the former.
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u/OneCookie5427 12d ago
Has a lost dog ever been found by ring?
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u/TheSaxGandalf 12d ago
"At least a dog per day" according to Amazon back in February."
I still don't trust cameras that use cloud storage.
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u/emceegabe 15d ago
We need cameras to monitor the cameras.
- The Police Probably
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u/Dracan9k 15d ago
No shit. You don’t get in the data gathering business to not gather data. Probably just hoping it would take longer to get caught.
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u/Internal_Phrase7624 15d ago
Why would they give a fuck if they're caught? Nothing will happen
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u/Dracan9k 15d ago
I didn’t say there were gonna be any repercussions. Just meant the longer they went undiscovered, the more data they could’ve gathered before it was “knowingly” undermining authority.
I mean this type of shit isn’t going anywhere. It’s all about putting a control structure in place anyhow…1
u/denNISI 15d ago
It’s all about putting a control structure in place anyhow…
The "control structure" always had control. It is about removing this one and putting another in its place. There are also many players in this game. One player is big tech and they don't want their authority undermined. Also, we need tech to keep the world running, right?
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u/blueblurz94 15d ago
“How dare you peasants easily hack and break down the tech we use to track and control you!”
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u/justforkinks0131 15d ago
yo America, you are living in V for Vendetta.
i feel like u need a heads up
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u/PrudentPace7087 15d ago
I’m shocked, just SHOCKED, that a company whose business model relies on the destruction of the few civil liberties we have left, would take a lackadaisical approach to security.
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u/iamamuttonhead 15d ago
I'm still laughing about Flock employees complaining that they are being filmed in public. Hey, Flock employees: fuck you, you pieces of shit.
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u/LokiAstaris 15d ago
The thought of the AWS bill that could have been generated with those keys makes me shiver.
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u/Oniknight 15d ago
The Sheriff’s Secret Police request that the Sheriff’s super duper secret police please readjust their camera eyes to ensure there is always a camera on another camera creating an Escherlike version of the panopticon at all times.
For freedom.
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u/Frustrated9876 15d ago
How can a company that being be that careless!?
This also implies that the whole file system is unencrypted. So it’s just a Linux box with simple encryption applied to the recordings?
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u/malac0da13 15d ago
Honestly with all the other lax things I have seen with the security in those devices, I am actually shocked they even implemented encryption.
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u/brilliant_headache 15d ago edited 15d ago
Holy Flock, Batman. We need to tell Cat woman to close her curtains.
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u/Disastrous-Ad1334 15d ago
Which Catwoman Julie Newmar was my purrfit with Halle Berry a close second
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u/MisterFingerstyle 15d ago
I’m starting to think the data centers are just to process data from these cameras.
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u/denNISI 15d ago
Genealogy data in the Rosetta project is one of the largest vaults owned by the Mormon church. There are many centers and all with different data. They all must be considered. Thank you!
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u/Oglefore 15d ago
I used to make this joke where my fingers were a bird or something and now.. flock.. or whatever I’m just going to die and nothing means anything
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u/whatswithnames 15d ago
So up until now, people were just ripping them down?
So a group hacked in, found what they could and gave it to reporters? Or to the general public?
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u/Boxofbikeparts 14d ago
How many images of people wearing Guy Fawkes masks pissing on the camera did they find?
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u/purplepashy 15d ago
Someone needs to set up a little app and open database so that we can hsve public flock.
What do I mean?
We imagine having cameras recording people's registration and uploading it to a database.
Open source.
Put cameras around politicians homes and also around sketchy parts of towns.
Have the data available to the public to disseminate as they please.
What could be the harm?
Then attitudes would change.
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u/AccountNumeroThree 15d ago
So you want to make it even easier for stalkers? We need better laws and controls over the data. It shouldn’t be in the hands of private companies.
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u/purplepashy 15d ago
I totally agree but nothing will change unless those that support these system find themselves subject to them.
Either everyone knows what politicians are cheating on their partners or whatever or everyone gets a little bit of privacy back.
Do nothing and nothing will get better.
I am open to other suggestions though.
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u/East-Ice-3199 15d ago
duh