Hackers Cracked a Flock Camera. Right here Is What Was Inside.

One digital camera. Twenty-one days of logged exercise. Roughly 50,200 automobiles photographed and roughly 1.6 million photos generated. That is what a single Flock Safety license plate reader produces in three weeks, in keeping with information recovered by a hacker collective and analyzed jointly by 404 Media and WIRED.

Flock cameras now function in additional than 6,000 communities throughout the United States, feeding a nationwide community accessible to hundreds of companies. Until this hack, the interior mechanics have been fully opaque to the general public.

How the Hack Happened

Physical entry to at least one roadside digital camera was sufficient to reveal the encryption mannequin Flock had publicly defended.

A gaggle calling itself stegan0gram bodily eliminated a Flock Safety digital camera from above a roadway, copied its inner storage, and shared the info with 404 Media and the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets, which then supplied it to WIRED for joint evaluation.

The digital camera runs Android throughout a number of storage partitions. Two of them, labeled “vendor” and “media,” have been unencrypted. The “media” partition contained an encryption key that unlocked a separate encrypted partition holding the digital camera’s movies and nonetheless photos.

That discovering straight contradicts Flock’s public place that on-device encryption protects footage even when somebody good points bodily entry, as a result of the important thing was recoverable from the machine itself, in keeping with 404 Media.

Earlier in 2025, safety researcher Jon “GainSec” Gaines had already documented root-level access vulnerabilities in a Flock digital camera. Flock downplayed the severity on the time, arguing saved footage remained out of attain. The stegan0gram dump challenges that declare.

Inside the Camera: What the Data Shows

The recovered information reveal a classy on-device computer-vision pipeline that Flock’s advertising supplies don’t totally describe.

The machine runs roughly 20 customized Flock-built Android apps, protecting movement detection, picture seize, object classification, mobile add, and distant firmware updates. Its processor is akin to a midrange smartphone.

Each time one thing strikes into body, the digital camera fires a burst of pictures, usually round 28 photos per passing car, with some occasions producing greater than 100. It makes use of completely different publicity settings inside every burst to optimize each plate legibility and broader scene seize.

The on-device software program explicitly detects folks, recording their location within the body and a confidence rating when an individual seems. Researchers discovered folks detected in 11 brief video clips from the recovered information, all bike riders, seemingly as a result of the digital camera’s angle was geared toward street site visitors slightly than sidewalks.

The license plate detection mannequin casts a large internet. Tests by WIRED and 404 Media discovered it misclassifying bumper stickers, seller frames, and ornamental graphics as plates. In one occasion, an American flag patch on a motorbike saddlebag was cropped as if it have been a license plate.

Full plate studying and car attribute identification, together with make, mannequin, and coloration, occur on Flock’s servers after add, not on the digital camera itself. Flock maintains that its cameras don’t carry out facial recognition, and the joint evaluation discovered no proof of lively face-recognition parts past default Android libraries that didn’t look like enabled.

The logs additionally provide a window into the system’s inner tradition. A watchdog course of logged “Who’s a good boy?!” greater than 12,000 occasions because it checked that the digital camera was nonetheless operating. On reboot, a service signed off with “A reboot was requested! Adiós, Amigos!” The casual tone of the code contrasts sharply with the size of law-enforcement use the system helps.

A National Network, Thousands of Agencies

Camera information put in by one native company could be searched by hundreds of others throughout the nation.

Once photos are uploaded, Flock’s system creates timestamped information linking a car to a particular digital camera location, with plate, coloration, make, and mannequin hooked up. In many deployments, that information will not be confined to the native company that owns the digital camera.

In Alpharetta, Georgia, digital camera information have been reportedly accessible to greater than 2,000 companies, according to WIRED. That record included police departments, faculties, airports, and the Office of Inspector General for the General Services Administration.

Reporting by 404 Media has documented native police utilizing the nationwide community to conduct searches on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This occurred even in jurisdictions that formally prohibit transferring license plate information out of state. In one case, a Texas officer searched nationwide Flock cameras for a girl who self-administered an abortion.

Separately, WIRED obtained frontend code for Flock’s AI tool OS Investigate, beforehand known as Nightshift. The instrument merges digital camera information with police case information, 911 logs, arrest information, ballistics information, and business identification databases together with Social Security numbers, beginning dates, and recognized relations. It ships with 69 pre-written AI prompts and helps movement-pattern searches, that means officers can secretly monitoring customers search for folks with out ranging from a recognized plate or identify.

stegan0gram has framed its work as activist reverse engineering, arguing that the aim is publicity slightly than destruction. One member advised reporters that being investigated is a “legitimate concern” and that the group works rigorously to remain low-profile.

Multiple folks throughout the nation have been arrested for allegedly tampering with Flock cameras, and a few cities have ended their contracts. At least one police division deployed a 3D-printed decoy digital camera shell to catch vandals.

The structure is now documented. The encryption mannequin has been examined and located wanting. What communities and companies select to do with that data is the query that is still unanswered.