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Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

wired.com

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Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#41

Post by shagie »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #35

Flock is a scourge on democracy. Flock is YC. But looks like they did YC nearly ten years ago. Who knows what their pitch deck looked like? If they pivoted since then to their current sinister incarnation? I don’t see any evidence that YC is still actively supporting them. Benefit of the doubt: Funding them for a community/city-owned traffic camera type thing seems like it would have been a much more reasonable propo…

Don't have the pitch deck directly, but do have some of the "what things looked like then" at https://www.ycdb.co/company/flock-safety

The front page then had "All the footage is yours. Your neighborhood 100% owns the data. Flock Safety will not share, sell, or access your data."

Unfortunately, flock has been excluded from wayback, so can't see other views of that page.

{insert Darth Vader: I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.}

(+45m edit) https://bestpitchdeck.com/flock-safety appears to be the pitch deck from 2020.

> ...

> In 2019, Flock signed their first police department deal with Jersey Village, Texas.

> The slides you see here are from Langley's pitch at a venture conference one month before closing a $47M Series C round in November 2020. The following July, Andreessen Horowitz led a $150M Series D investment in Flock as a cornerstone of their American Dynamism practice. Additional slides are included from keynote and sales presentations used in 2023.

> ...

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#42

Post by [deleted] »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #35

Flock is a scourge on democracy. Flock is YC. But looks like they did YC nearly ten years ago. Who knows what their pitch deck looked like? If they pivoted since then to their current sinister incarnation? I don’t see any evidence that YC is still actively supporting them. Benefit of the doubt: Funding them for a community/city-owned traffic camera type thing seems like it would have been a much more reasonable propo…

[deleted]

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#45

Post by MBCook »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #35

Flock is a scourge on democracy. Flock is YC. But looks like they did YC nearly ten years ago. Who knows what their pitch deck looked like? If they pivoted since then to their current sinister incarnation? I don’t see any evidence that YC is still actively supporting them. Benefit of the doubt: Funding them for a community/city-owned traffic camera type thing seems like it would have been a much more reasonable propo…

It’s not like this stuff wasn’t known to be a problem 10 years ago. We were already in Trump’s first term, it’s not like it was part of the early post 9/11 “secure everything” push. It was WAY after that.

10 years ago is no excuse.

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#46

Post by glaslong »

drfloyd51 wrote: post #9

So… all that data is literally there for any unauthorized person to walk up and take it. It’s not even suitably encrypted on device? Zero trust in anything Flock says.

Yep. Clown show.

> The hackers said they were able to access the Android system on the camera, and found two partitions—sections of its hard-drive, essentially. A few of these were unencrypted, the hackers said, including one called “vendor” and another called “media.” The latter contained an encryption key that unlocked another part, which contained much of the media—think, the videos and stills—the camera took.

> In early 2025, security researcher Jon “GainSec” Gaines reverse engineered a Flock license-plate reader and documented flaws that could be used to gain root-level access. After Gaines disclosed his findings, the company acknowledged the findings but downplayed their severity, writing that the flaws required physical access to the device and that even someone who gained access to a camera “would still not be able to gain access to footage” because images remained on the device only briefly after being transmitted to the cloud.

Source: https://www.404media.co/hackers-stole-flocks-camera-software...

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#47

Post by outside1234 »

ktm5j wrote: post #44

> "We liberated hardware" Ya know, I'm not on Flock's side here.. but be real, this is theft. You should be able to own that if you're going to do something like this.

And my privacy? The threat to democracy? Does Flock own that? Why is always the poors that need to own morality?

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#48

Post by incee »

fullstop wrote: post #12
driverdan wrote: post #2

This reporting was done in collaboration with 404media. Here's the discussion for 404's article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49726577 Distributed Denial of Secrets has published the partition images: https://ddosecrets.org/article/flock-alpr-camera

I poked around in the boot partition. The kernel is ancient! Linux version 3.18.71-perf-gaf770dc

3.18.71-perf-gaf770dc is a Qualcomm Android vendor kernel from roughly late 2017. The 3.18 branch went fully EOL in 2019, so nothing after that was ever backported to it.

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#49

Post by nullable_bool »

zzzeek wrote: post #36

If I had to guess now it works it would be: 1. Take pictures 2. Send to a big server that all cops nationwide can log into whenever they want to stalk their exes Did I miss something

The system they log into is called DAVID(Driver and Automobile Information Database) which logs activity. If an officer access that information for unlawful purposes, they can be prosecuted. You probably wont believe it, but the reason you hear about cops stalking their ex's is because they got caught doing so.

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#50

Post by ohyoutravel »

MBCook wrote: post #45
ohyoutravel wrote: post #35

Flock is a scourge on democracy. Flock is YC. But looks like they did YC nearly ten years ago. Who knows what their pitch deck looked like? If they pivoted since then to their current sinister incarnation? I don’t see any evidence that YC is still actively supporting them. Benefit of the doubt: Funding them for a community/city-owned traffic camera type thing seems like it would have been a much more reasonable propo…

It’s not like this stuff wasn’t known to be a problem 10 years ago. We were already in Trump’s first term, it’s not like it was part of the early post 9/11 “secure everything” push. It was WAY after that. 10 years ago is no excuse.

It’s not an excuse, but gives some luxury of distance. We have a lot more hindsight now on how rotten things can become, so with that hindsight it’s easy to say that companies like Flock shouldn’t exist, or shouldn’t be invested in. Ten years ago required some more leaps in foresight that some people were making, I was, but even I didn’t think it would get as evil as it has.
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