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Title: Hackers Stole Flock's Camera Software, Revealing How the Company
Tracks Cars and People

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/09/17/05172...

"Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete
copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and
WIRED," according to an article published on both sites. Though Flock has
described its system as protected by on-device encryption, "The hackers were
able to copy the camera's storage and recover an encryption key stored on the
device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections." The
hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit
Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED. 404 Media
and WIRED then analyzed those files as part of a joint investigation... [T]he
joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the
device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and
bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle
and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a
million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper
stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch
on a motorcyclist's saddlebag... According to our analysis, the camera's logs
recorded about 21 days of activity across several periods. During those
windows, the device photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles and generated about
1.6 million images. On a typical day, it logged around 3,300 vehicles, with a
high of 4,454... The software running on the camera explicitly detects
people, something which is typically overlooked in discussions around Flock
cameras. When it spots a person, it records where they appear in the image
and how confident it is in the detection. It was a collective calling itself
stegan0gram that breached the cameras, according to the interview they did
with Wired and 404 Media. "Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer
them and find the secrets of those spying on us?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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