They stole a road camera – and extracted data on 50,000 vehicles

Hackers in the US physically stole a license plate recognition camera from Flock Safety, dismantled it in a lab, and extracted data on approximately 50,200 vehicles, 1.6 million images, and 27,000 videos. A former Secret Service cyber expert clarifies this is an isolated incident of physical access to a single device, with no breach of the central cloud.

An unusual cybersecurity incident in the United States: hackers physically stole a license plate recognition camera from Flock Safety off a light pole, dismantled it in a lab, and performed reverse engineering. From the device's internal memory, they extracted approximately 1.6 million images, data on 50,200 different vehicles, and about 27,000 short video clips, along with an encryption key that allowed access to recordings from about 21 days of activity. The exposure was published in WIRED magazine and raised serious concerns about a widespread data leak. However, Jason Brown, a senior executive at intelligence firm iCOUNTER who served 25 years in the US Secret Service in the field of cybercrime, clarified in an interview with FOX Business that this is an isolated incident of physical access to a single device, and that the company's central cloud infrastructure was never breached. According to him, pulling data from the single camera did not grant the attackers the ability to penetrate the cloud servers, and therefore no widespread data leak from the main system occurred. Brown added that past isolated access control issues have been fixed, and today about 97% of law enforcement agencies using the system are protected by multi-factor authentication.