404media.co Hackers Stole Flock’s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People Joseph Cox 11–13 minutes
This article was produced in collaboration with WIRED. You can read their version of the article here.
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, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety’s cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people. The hackers say they are also publishing details on how they managed to obtain the software, in the hopes that other people may copy them.
The breach provides an unprecedented look inside a system that Flock has described 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.
While much of the automatic license plate reader’s (ALPR) most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the 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.
The act of removing the camera and dumping its software shows that some people are not content with just destroying or removing the cameras. Across the country, multiple people have been arrested for allegedly tampering with or otherwise sabotaging Flock’s cameras. In response, some towns have announced that they are going to stop using Flock’s cameras altogether, and in one case, a police department even made a fake, 3D-printed Flock camera case in order to bait potential vandals.
💡
Do you know anything else about Flock? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
“Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?” one of the hackers, from a collective calling itself stegan0gram, said in an interview. “We liberated hardware in the field, disarmed them, and proceeded with reverse engineering of the cameras and associated solar equipment.”
Flock’s cameras photograph passing vehicles and send the images and other data to the company’s servers. There, Flock’s system presumably reads the license plate and can identify characteristics such as the vehicle’s color, make, and model. Flock then makes these timestamped records searchable by whichever local agency owns or has access to the cameras. But in many cases, Flock’s system also allows other police departments from all over the country to search those cameras too, as part of the company’s national network. In Alpharetta, Georgia, for example, WIRED found that records from the city’s Flock cameras were accessible to more than 2,000 agencies, including police departments, colleges, airports, and even inexplicably the Office of Inspector General for the federal General Services Administration. A screenshot from the analysis of the Flock camera. License plate redaction by 404 Media.
This national network has been a selling point for Flock, but also a deep source of controversy. 404 Media revealed that local cops were performing lookups in the national network on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including in areas that banned working with immigration authorities or transferring license plate data out of state. 404 Media also revealed a cop in Texas searched Flock cameras nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion. Those stories, among others, triggered a national conversation about whether people want Flock cameras, or ALPRs more generally, in their communities.
And in the case of stegan0gram, the answer is clearly, no.
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.
404 Media and WIRED analyzed the camera’s contents. The device’s processor is similar to those used in midrange smartphones, and it runs about 20 Flock-built apps that handle everything from detecting motion and taking pictures to classifying objects, uploading data and receiving remote updates. A screenshot of the analysis showing that Flock detects people.
According to the code, when something moves into view, the camera takes a rapid series of photos. A typical passing vehicle generated about 28 images, though some produced more than 100. The camera uses different exposures to capture both the license plate and the wider scene, then scans the images, selects and crops useful frames, and sends them with other data to Flock over the cellular network. The camera itself does not appear to read the plate or identify the vehicle’s make, model, and color. That appears to happen on Flock’s servers.
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. Those figures would vary considerably depending on where a camera is installed and how much traffic passes in front of it. The camera was almost certainly operating outside those periods, but older logs had been overwritten or were no longer recoverable from the device.
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.
To test what the software could actually see, WIRED extracted the models from the camera’s files and ran them against test images and footage recovered from the device. The models readily detected people, including a selfie of a reporter. WIRED then ran them across 27,321 short video clips stored on the camera. The clips were mp4 files, each about one to two seconds long, recorded at 1024 by 768 pixels without audio. They were separate from the rapid bursts of higher-resolution still images the camera also takes as vehicles pass. The models detected people in 11 of the clips, all of them riding motorcycles. The small number is likely due to the camera’s position above a roadway, pointed down at passing traffic where pedestrians were unlikely to appear.
The tests also showed how broadly the camera’s plate detector could interpret what it saw. In some cases, it mistook bumper stickers, dealership frames, and other graphics for license plates and cropped them out as if they were plates. In one video of a passing motorcycle, the detector cropped an American flag patch on the rider’s saddlebag as if it were a plate.
Flock insists its cameras do not perform face recognition. WIRED and 404 Media found no evidence of any face-recognition capabilities in the camera’s software beyond ones included by default in the Android operating system. Those capabilities did not appear to be enabled or in active use.
In August, WIRED obtained front-end code for Flock’s police software, now called OS Investigate and previously known as Nightshift, and reconstructed portions of the tool. That software showed how Flock can use the records generated by its cameras, along with police files and commercial data, to identify drivers, surface vehicles that repeatedly travel together, and search for people based on patterns of movement. The data provides a view of the other end of a system.
A Flock spokesperson said in a statement: “The unauthorized removal and tampering of a Flock camera is illegal.” When asked specifically about the encryption key stored on the camera, the company added, “Flock takes security seriously and maintains a public Vulnerability Disclosure Policy for security researchers to report potential vulnerabilities directly to us. We received no report through that process, and based on the limited information provided, we do not have enough detail to assess the claims being made. If the individuals identified legitimate vulnerabilities, we encourage them to submit their technical findings through our vulnerability reporting process so our security team can review them and take any appropriate action.”
One of the hackers said, “Being investigated is a legit concern and something we are trying to avoid. I'm sure our actions have attracted some attention as it is but we are careful and try to keep a low profile.”
Noel Pichardo, a former Pawtucket Rhode Island police officer who became an outspoken critic of Flock after challenging his department’s use of the cameras, says that he understands the activists’ frustration but worries that sabotaging devices could ultimately strengthen the case for them. “I think that type of vigilantism will only crystallize the police and the state at large in their belief that this tool is necessary,” Pichardo says. “The longer the state continues to ignore the groanings of their constituents who are against this type of surveillance, the more this will happen.”
The camera’s logs also show the camera struggling with storage. Its logs recorded more than 27,000 “no space left on device” errors while trying to save full-resolution images, along with tens of thousands of related errors, crashes, and reboots. At the same time, about every two minutes, code checked that the camera was still running and logged the message, “Who’s a good boy?!” More than 12,000 of those messages appear in the recovered logs.
When the camera did restart, another service left a final message in the logs: “A reboot was requested! ¡Adios Amigos!”
About the author
Joseph is an award-winning investigative journalist focused on generating impact. His work has triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines, shut down tech companies, and much more.
Joseph Cox
no comments (yet)