Hackers Reverse-Engineer Flock ALPR Camera Revealing Extensive Surveillance Capabilities and Security Flaws

Hackers obtained a Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR) camera and reverse-engineered its software. The analysis revealed that the camera's software explicitly detects people, vehicles, license plates, and bicycles, and can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle. According to several weeks of recovered logs, the camera generated more than a million images, and its computer-vision software sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including an American flag patch on a motorcyclist's saddlebag. While the most sensitive storage remained encrypted, the hackers bypassed disk encryption because one unencrypted partition contained the encryption key for an encrypted partition.