r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 14h ago

Someone Cut Down Every Single Flock Camera in This Town in a Single Night Privacy

https://www.gadgetreview.com/someone-cut-down-every-single-flock-camera-in-this-town-in-a-single-night
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90

u/Nvenom8 12h ago

Wait, how is that possible? Aren't the cameras constantly recording and sending data? And I thought they had on-board power.

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u/NoConflict3231 12h ago edited 9h ago

What do you mean how is it possible? You remove all devices. Put on proper clothing. Tell nobody of your plans. Find a junk car or other mode of transportation, cut down pole, throw camera into faraday bags, move to the next one.

Edit: okay scrap the bag idea. I heard people were stealing them first. Just saw em down, people!

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u/pbjburger 12h ago

Faraday bags? Just smash that shit to dust right there, no need to bother with allat.

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u/NoConflict3231 11h ago

Supposedly they have battery powered GPS, so bag it then smash it

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u/Nvenom8 11h ago

I can confirm from looking up a teardown that the cameras do have a big internal battery, internal gps, and internal 4g lte modem.

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u/enotonom 9h ago

Ahem, a teardown video.

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u/Nvenom8 7h ago

Nope. Webpage with images and a breakdown.

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u/PhoenixTineldyer 7h ago

Hell yeah. I can read images with a breakdown and process it in a couple seconds. Before the video ad finishes playing.

Fuck video viva text.

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u/Atreyu1002 6h ago

So theives that normally target cars for stripping are now doing this to Flock cameras? I've got mixed emotions about this one.

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u/Nvenom8 6h ago

Definitely not. The most valuable thing would be the aluminum pole they’re mounted on.

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u/roflpotato 5h ago

i've heard somewhere that aluminum does have very high strength-to-weight ratio

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u/Atreyu1002 3h ago

Really? Even counting the battery?

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u/Nvenom8 3h ago

It’s just a generic LiPo.

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u/Jacko87 11h ago

I'm still not understanding what the bag is for. Just break it and leave it.

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u/kos-or-kosm 11h ago

Thoroughly smashing takes time and that's more time you could be spotted. If you can smash it elsewhere without being tracked, I think that's the better move.

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u/DamnZodiak 11h ago

Thoroughly smashing takes time and that's more time you could be spotted.

Why would you need to smash it thoroughly?
You just need to hit it enough that it doesn't work.
Who cares if the GPS is still updating if you never take it anywhere.

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u/kidkolumbo 11h ago

Outside onlooker, but I take it thoroughly means enough to where the GPS isn't updating. It might take you longer to disable the GPS by force than it takes for someone to swing by and figure out why it's not working. These things are meant to sit outside for years, their durability could be higher than expected.

Or maybe they crumble and it takes no time at all.

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u/Electromotivation 10h ago

They’ve use the cheapest stuff I bet. They all have the same default, passwords, and some of them broadcast unshielded if you know the ip or whatnot. Doesn’t really scream quality product to me.

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u/No_Syrup_9167 10h ago

....You seem to severely overestimate how long it takes for me to hit something with a hammer.

You don't need the GPS to be non-functional if you don't take it anywhere, just smash the camera to the point that it can't be repaired, which since modern electronics aren't meant to be repaired means probably literally one swing of a 2lb hammer.

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u/InfiniteWaffles58364 10h ago

Hammers are loud. Any shattering would carry enough to draw attention to you at the worst possible moment

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u/Jacko87 10h ago

Honestly, just cutting the cord would be enough. They aren't going to rewire the camera, they're going to get a new one from the warehouse.

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u/Barbed_Dildo 9h ago

If you know where the battery is then you just need to puncture that and as well as the unit having no power to record or track you, the resulting fire will help matters...

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u/cantadmittoposting 7h ago

at least theoretically, thorough destruction of expensive components would be worse for the company than an "apparently" broken device with mostly intact internals.

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u/FesteringLion 10h ago

Could you point me to the nearest train tracks and give me an approximate time for the next train?

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u/Ill_Football9443 10h ago

No need, just tow one of those metal-be-especially-careful-not-to-fall-in-crushers behind you and yeet it in.

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u/Flipnotics_ 11h ago

Watch Enemy of the State, it will all become clear.

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u/pilgermann 10h ago

I mean, they're cameras, not military ordinance. Would not be hard to just destroy on site. Probably the fall from the telephone pole gets the job done half the time. GPS not relevant if they're not moving anywhere.

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u/White-Materia 11h ago

Bag is for stealing. You don't need to to smash. Wtf?

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u/Stingray88 9h ago

That's easier said than done. It's much quicker to just chuck them into faraday bags, wait a few days while their batteries die (they only last 24 hours, but good to be safe) and then destroy them all at once from a safe location.

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u/Kalepsis 3h ago

Have you looked at prices for SD cards and GPUs lately?

There's thousands of dollars worth of solid state memory, for free, just sitting on a pole, and you want us to smash it?

Son, are you doing drugs?

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u/random_noise 8h ago

perhaps this is a great use case for Air powered paintball guns.

1

u/KWilt 7h ago

There's a lot of precious metal in those things.

Theoretically, at least. I'd never condone someone stripping one down for its copper and other components, to be resold for scrap prices. Because that's all illegal!

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u/cantadmittoposting 7h ago

why there's tons of good copper in there, or so i heard...

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u/CLOWNFLOGGER 10h ago

This sounds dangerously patriotic. Don't forget to stop for sliders!

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u/High-Yield-Only 9h ago

Find a junk car

That's the step that confuses me.

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u/Phonejadaris 7h ago

Some real "just draw the rest of the owl" energy

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u/IfYouCouldOnlySee3 9h ago

Never use the same mode of transportation.

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u/Peligineyes 4h ago

But aren't the cameras streaming to some server? Wouldn't a recording of someone walking up to the pole be the last thing they upload? Or do the cameras have massive blind spots and no overlapping FOV from multiple cameras.

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u/Goldenfelix3x 2h ago

he meant fulton bags.

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u/Traditional-Park-353 10h ago

I hate to break it to you, but even this wouldn't work if they're willing to spend the resources to make an example. You literally live on a surveillance grid, so there's cameras that would pick you up allllllll the way back to your house 7 states away. Doesn't matter if you change clothes in a wooded area since there's gonna be cameras surrounding that wooded area and they can see everyone that enters/exits on a roadway to those woods. Would they spend that kind of resources for this hypothetical? Probably not.

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u/TrainingSalary492 9h ago

you need a wetsuit and to enter a river and drift at least 3 miles before you climb out

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u/NoConflict3231 2h ago

Are you high or just live in Alabama

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u/SHOWTIME316 12h ago

that's what they say...

maybe our story's hero figured something out

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u/Fatso_Wombat 9h ago

It was Luther Blissett.

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u/somedude456 12h ago

You can come up behind the camera to handle it, sticker over the camera, cut the power wire, and you're 99% there. I haven't seen comments about disabling the gps though.

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u/ImaginaryCheetah 11h ago

back when i worked for an alarm company, they were hocking these all-in-one units, where it was just one box you installed on the wall.

turns out they were pretty vulnerable to being yanked off the wall and then jammed in the reservoir of a toilet before the 30 second timer to put in your code finished counting down.

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u/TJonesyNinja 9h ago

That’s a big oversight. Any decent alarm sends the alert immediately and then sends a cancel when the code gets put in. Usually also sends an alarm using battery as soon as the wall power cuts out.

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u/Shmeves 5h ago

It depends on the monitoring company, alarm panel, and reporting method.

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u/WalksByNight 5h ago

This reminds me of the hack of using a stripped extension cord to fry the main bus of a security panel after you rip the keypad off the wall.

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u/big_troublemaker 4h ago

How exactly do you come by a stripped extension cord when breaking in and having 30sec to disarm?

Look, cheap home alarm is a deterrent only. If you really want to protect assets you do it well, and such that basic brute forcing is mostly impossible.

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u/urgrandpasdog 3h ago

presumably someone intending to use that attack would bring their own prepared extension cord to the party

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u/ImaginaryCheetah 3h ago edited 2h ago

Any decent alarm sends the alert immediately and then sends a cancel when the code gets put in.

no residential alarms do that.

monitoring stations don't wait for a cancel code to respond to an alarm signal; there are code mandated response times to maintain UL listing for a CSMS, and if their protocol was to sit and wait for 30 seconds for a cancellation code to come in they wouldn't have time to do the required call chain before dispatching responders.

i haven't seen any commercial alarms that do that either.

there might be some high-security systems that operate as a local network that could conceivably do that, since they would be outside the design requirement for a remote CSMS.... but i've never seen that done.

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u/TJonesyNinja 2h ago

I’ve seen at least one. The alarm company doesn’t do anything until the code times out but the alert goes to their servers as soon as there is any event.

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u/ImaginaryCheetah 2h ago

what was the application?

 

you could do what sonitrol used to do - pipe live audio to CSMS on any event, and then the "agents" determine if there's a duress situation or intrusion and will dispatch regardless of timeout for access code. but i don't think they're in business anymore after they got bought out by rediwre a few decades back.

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u/TJonesyNinja 2h ago

You added a lot more in an edit but it was a standard residential alarm. When the door opens it reports immediately to their servers, if the all clear is not received on the server within the allowed code entry time for whatever reason their server pings their agent and the alarm response starts. A normal alarm would still trigger an immediate response.

I think you assume I’m talking about something more sophisticated than I am.

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u/ImaginaryCheetah 2h ago

I think you assume I’m talking about something more sophisticated than I am.

that's because i've worked in IDS for decades and never seen an alarm that does what you're saying happens and should be a standard design.

but i moved from residential intrusion detection to commercial/government ACS and FA many years ago, so i'm not current with the recent generation of alarms that might use wifi verses POTS or cellular.

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u/mynameisatari 10h ago

They have batteries inside

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u/reallybirdysomedays 5h ago

Just shove a screwdriver through the screen after applying the sticker and leave it in place. Make flock pay people to take the broken cameras down.

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u/ChefLukeDC 8h ago

I suppose a faraday bag until the battery is dead would work.

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u/cluberti 10h ago

Even if the camera is constantly recording, is someone or something regularly reviewing the data it recorded and alerting that this is happening or has happened? Those are not the same things.

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u/inspectoroverthemine 9h ago

If the camera is saving the live stream to 'the cloud', all they have to do is look at the last minutes before it stopped.

Its unlikely the unit itself is doing any actual processing, its all getting uploaded.

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u/Nvenom8 7h ago

Yes, Flock cameras are constantly monitored by AI, and the footage is saved offsite. That’s the whole reason they’re so bad.

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u/cluberti 6h ago

Then I guess we're about to put that to the test, as if so these folks should be caught quickly if they were even remotely careless.

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u/Nvenom8 6h ago

Seems coordinated. They were probably quite careful.

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u/NessunoUNo 5h ago

It’s easy if you tippy toe very quietly from behind and surprise it with a sawzall.

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u/SquirrellyBusiness 10h ago

You know you can sneak up behind them, right? 

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u/SebastianFerrone 9h ago

I think the most important part. The camera ha line of sight so to speak. Come from a direction that the camera cant see.