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<\/p>\nI am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me\u2014without any password or login\u2014to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.<\/p>\n
Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Unlike many of Flock\u2019s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock\u2019s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people\u2019s faces as they walk through a parking lot, down a public street, or play on a playground, or they can be controlled manually, according to marketing material on Flock\u2019s website. We watched Condor cameras zoom in on a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban Atlanta; a camera followed a man walking through a Macy\u2019s parking lot in Bakersfield; surveil children swinging on a swingset at a playground; and film high-res video of people sitting at a stoplight in traffic. In one case, we were able to watch a man rollerblade down Brookhaven, Georgia\u2019s Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. The Flock camera zoomed in on him and tracked him as he rolled past. Minutes later, he showed up on another exposed camera livestream further down the bike path. The camera\u2019s resolution was good enough that we were able to see that, when he stopped beneath one of the cameras, he was watching rollerblading videos on his phone.<\/p>\n
The exposure was initially discovered by YouTuber and technologist Benn Jordan and was shared with security researcher Jon \u201cGainSec\u201d Gaines, who recently found numerous vulnerabilities<\/a> in several other models of Flock\u2019s automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. They shared the details of what they found\u00a0 with me, and I verified many of the details seen in the exposed portals by driving to Bakersfield to walk in front of two cameras there while I watched myself on the livestream. I also pulled Flock\u2019s contracts with cities for Condor cameras, pulled details from company presentations about the technology, and geolocated a handful of the cameras to cities and towns across the United States. Jordan also filmed himself in front of several of the cameras on the Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. Jordan said he and Gaines discovered many of the exposed cameras with Shodan, an internet of things search engine that researchers regularly use to identify improperly secured devices.\u00a0<\/p>\n After finding links to the feed, \u201cimmediately, we were just without any username, without any password, we were just seeing everything from playgrounds to parking lots with people, Christmas shopping and unloading their stuff into cars,\u201d Jordan told me in an interview. \u201cI think it was like the first time that I actually got like immediately scared \u2026 I think the one that affected me most was as playground. You could see unattended kids, and that\u2019s something I want people to know about so they can understand how dangerous this is.\u201d In a YouTube video about his research, Jordan said he was able to use footage pulled from the exposed feed to identify specific people using open source investigation tools in order to show how trivially an exposure like this could be abused.<\/p>\n This post is for paid members only<\/p>\n Become a paid member for unlimited ad-free access to articles, bonus podcast content, and more.<\/p>\n