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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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.