A curious security researcher who bought a Motorola automated license plate reader was able to discover a concerning security flaw that affects hundreds of live ALPR cameras across the country. Matt Brown, who runs Brown Fine Security, purchased a Motorola ReaperHD ALPR license plate reader surveillance camera off eBay and quickly found that many of the same, live cameras are misconfigured to stream color, infrared black-and-white and car data including license plate numbers to the open internet where they can be accessed by anyone in real time without a username or password.
Brown, who made a series of YouTube videos demonstrating his proof-of-concept tool that exposes these vulnerabilities, initially only reverse engineered his own camera to extract the device’s firmware when he found video streams on the device. He then set out to see if any of the real world devices were available online, and was able to use text from a 404 error page to find the IP addresses of the exposed devices on the public internet. More than 150 devices appear when using a publicly available internet scanning tool.
