I have to say, what this reminds me of is there was a glitch on Amazon for a while.

I don't know if it's still there, where if you went to buy condoms, it would ask you, would you like to buy this item used?

Smashing Security. Smashing Security, episode 486, Vibe-Coded Shops and Hackable Flock Cameras, with Graham Cluley and special guest Dave Bittner.

Hello, hello, and welcome to Smashing Security, episode 486. My name's Graham Cluley.

The good news is, Dave, actually, is I'm going to be recommending that all of our listeners go and check out your podcasts, particularly next week, because there isn't going to be an episode of Smashing Security next week.

I am grabbing a map, a compass, and a rucksack full of cheese sandwiches, and I am going to be venturing into the wilds of Britain because I'm moving house.

I'm going to a different part of the UK.

And I won't have a chance to put out an episode next week.

What I will be doing is I'll be really busy contacting the CEO of Openreach and asking why it's so hard to get me a fibre internet connection to my house when there's a box just 5 feet away from me.

Yeah, exactly. What could possibly go wrong? But never fear, folks.

If you can hold your breath until Thursday, the 8th of October, there'll be a new episode of Smashing Security then.

And in the meantime, check out Caveat and Hacking Humans and The Cyber Wire and all the other — well, thank you.

Well, before we kick off, let's thank this week's wonderful sponsors, ThreatLocker, Origin, and Vanta. We'll be hearing more about them later on in the podcast.

This week on Smashing Security, we won't be talking about how researchers managed to take over the accounts of staff at OpenAI using Anthropic's Claude.

You'll hear no discussion of how Dutch police have asked for the public's help after releasing a recording of what they believe to be the voice of a member of the Shiny Hunters hacking group.

And we won't even mention how North Korea has been posing as recruiters to infect job seekers during fake coding tests and then waiting for them to get hired somewhere real.

So Dave, what are you going to be talking about this week?

The spreadsheets. There are so many spreadsheets. Vendor risk assessments unread. Audit evidence scattered like ash in the wind.

I've filled out the same questionnaire 4 times this week, Graham. 4 times! Some men choose to face this alone, but not tonight.

Vanta's a trust management platform that automates the mind-numbing stuff that makes you want to poke your eyes out with a fork.

No more manual evidence chasing, no more questionnaire hell. It continuously monitors your systems and keeps you audit ready for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, the works.

And it uses AI. Yes, Joe, it does.

I imagine they are pretty fresh and clean, those beautiful feet of yours these days.

I'm asking because this week, somewhere in Auckland, New Zealand, there is a convenience store that briefly was selling a pair of crusty socks on its website.

And that wasn't all they were selling. They were also selling a rather divine Princess Diana commemorative plate.

Now, this wasn't some marketing stunt. This wasn't a flea market with any old bric-a-brac and odds and sods and national parks and the like.

Instead, this particular store had made a bit of an error when it built its website.

It had used something called Base44, and Base44 is a vibe coding platform owned by Wix, one of those places where they sort of roll your own website.

You can go to it and out the other end of the mixer will come a brand new website. Dave, have you ever vibe coded at all? It's very popular these days.

I think at this point it's unavoidable. I think it's out of the box and there's no putting it back in there.

But the people I know who are professional developers, many of them say that their job has shifted from actually being a developer to being a supervisor of the AI that's actually doing the coding.

I suppose as long as there's oversight, then it's okay, but I think everybody's a little nervous about this.

I think if you've spent years and years studying how to code and now you've been replaced by a glorified speak-and-spell machine, you are going to be pretty upset about this.

I have vibe coded myself sometimes. You know how Liam Neeson in that movie says he has a very particular set of skills?

Well, I have a very particular set of requirements on my computer sometimes. You just, oh, if only my computer would do this in this particular way.

And in the past, I would spend hours looking for a utility which did that particular thing.

And I do find myself now sometimes thinking, hmm, rather than spending four months coding this myself, maybe I could ask an AI to help me. And bloomin' heck, I mean, they can do it.

I wouldn't necessarily want to roll it out to the public. I wouldn't necessarily want to give it to other people and let them find the vulnerabilities in it.

Yes. You know, think, okay, I could run this on my computer. But here's the problem.

Somewhere in the process of vibe coding their own e-commerce site, these chaps who were running this store, they somehow left the entire thing open to be edited by anybody on the entire internet.

Yeah. Exactly. And you also think, well, how did Base44 ever allow that to be possible?

So even if it wasn't a vulnerability in Base44, I suspect it was actually the setting up of the particular environment where there was an error.

Why did they, considering this was something which was meant to be used by non-professionals, people who weren't versed in computer security and technology — maybe, you know, I need a website.

I run a shop selling shoelaces. I know nothing about computers. Can you create me a website? Yes, I'll go and do that. How can they leave it open like that?

And of course, inevitably, random members of the public did discover that they could just go to the website and make any changes they wanted.

They could add their own listings to the live site.

Of course, the internet never disappoints when given an opportunity like that.

So you too could buy a pair of crusty old socks, or you could purchase a single banana for $850, or a mouldy school lunch.

You too could find yourself paying off New Zealand's Deputy Prime Minister for $3,000. All kinds of things. There was even this Princess Diana commemorative dinner plate for $1.50.

Now, I've shared with you—

Graham, never before has the beauty of the dear departed princess been on better display than it is on this, this clearly handmade and painted plate.

I would be honoured and proud to display this anywhere in my home, and I hope our listeners will take the time to check it out. It's just gorgeous.

It's a beautiful thing. And there it is alongside the Laser Kiwi, which obviously is something every person in New Zealand needs.

Dave, if you had the opportunity to list something on a site like this, what sort of thing do you imagine you would want to list?

What wonders would you put up on this online emporium?

So at some point, the actual store owner tweaked what was going on and he tried to fight back, but he didn't know how to secure the site.

So instead what he did was he started posting other items for sale with titles like, please stop hacking us.

And within minutes, someone else added a new listing saying, well, don't use an AI site builder then, which seems like fair enough security advice coming for free from the general public.

Now, this, as I said, may not have been explicitly the fault of Base44. Maybe the security settings hadn't been set properly.

But, you know, it's not as though this were the first time that Base44 has made the headlines.

Last year, security researchers at Wiz found an authentication bypass vulnerability in the platform. That allowed unauthorised access to private apps built by its users.

What that meant was if you could see the URL, which of course you could in your browser, of a particular app, you would then be able to create a verified account to access it as the owner yourself.

So the supposedly secret app ID was there for anybody to see in the URL. So security, not necessarily their strong point. Wow.

And how much did Wix pay in order to acquire Base44? I hope they think this was money well spent. Or maybe they bought them and then got rid of all the security engineers.

I don't know.

So Dave, there's going to be a lot of small businesses wanting their websites to be built or refreshed.

It's like, oh, we can't really carry on with this Dreamweaver site we created in 1999 anymore, we're going to have to do a bit of a revamp of that.

And so you've got to think a lot of people will turn to simple tools that promise a lot, but that the users don't really understand.

Because these tools, they're explicitly marketed at people who have no idea, not a clue what an access control setting is.

And the AI might happily build you a gorgeous looking website, but it won't necessarily tell you if you've left all the doors and windows wide open.

So I raise a glass right now to the people of New Zealand who, with good humour, have— I mean, technically, I suppose what they did was maybe that was against the law.

I don't know whether it was or not.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because sometimes there can be marketing stunts like this to get you some traffic. I tried going to this particular website — right now it's down.

You get a Cloudflare error.

I don't know if it's because too many people have gone there or they thought, we don't know how to stop this, we're just going to yank out some cables — they've turned it off.

But there have been cases in the past where companies — I can think of one dating site for beautiful people, for instance, where they intentionally pretended that they had been hacked in order to get lots of press coverage.

A very unusual story. I'll link to it in the show notes if anyone's interested in that.

That's the one.

One of the things that really struck me was how the people who actually built those AI models had a hard time reconstructing exactly what the agents had done and said to each other.

Which is exactly the question this week's sponsor, Origin, wants you thinking about.

If an AI agent caused an incident at your company tomorrow, what evidence could you actually produce?

For most teams, the honest answer is not much.

You've got the prompt and you've got the final result, but everything in between — the commands it ran, the files it changed, the credentials it picked up along the way — that's usually gone the moment the terminal closes.

And that's the gap our sponsor, Origin, was built to close. Origin is an endpoint AI observability company. A sensor on the machine records the agent's work as it happens.

Who started the session, what was asked, what the agent reached, and what it changed, all on one timeline.

So if something unexpected happens, you're not piecing it together from scattered logs.

You open the trace and read the session in order from the original prompt through to the outcome.

It works wherever agents actually operate too. Coding agents in a terminal, local agents, anything calling an MCP server on a laptop.

None of that needs to pass through a cloud gateway for Origin to see it.

Flock surveillance cameras? Yes, we do. Britain is supposed to be the country with more CCTV cameras than practically anywhere else. I think we've only got more than North Korea.

But these Flock ones, they're making lots of headlines over in the States, aren't they? They seem to be quite invasive.

They are. And we're doing our best to catch up with you all. These Flock Safety cameras are popping up like dandelions all over the place.

In fact, there are open-source projects to track their locations.

People have put together Google Maps where you can look at your community and see where the Flock Safety cameras are around you.

There are several around where I live, and they're easy to spot. They have a particular look to them, and I find it disturbing as they're popping up all over the place.

These are licence plate reading cameras.

So the idea is you drive by with your car, it takes a picture of your car, it logs your licence plate, it logs the type of car, what direction you were going, the time of day, all that sort of thing.

And of course, you get enough of these little bits of data, and you can put together a picture of where someone's going and when they're going and what they may be up to.

So hackers have gotten their hands on one of these cameras. And by getting their hands on one, I think they backed a truck into it and ran off with it.

I think that's sort of the subtext of what's going on here. But there are hundreds of thousands of them all over our great nation, so I don't think they'll miss the one.

But they got a good look inside the cameras, and from a security point of view, it's not good. There's a hacker collective called Stegonogram.

So they got their hands on this Flock camera. They took it apart, and they extracted its storage.

And the group Distributed Denial of Secrets has published images of those file systems, which has enabled lots of researchers to take a look under the hood at what exactly is going on here.

So security researcher Mika Lee, who you've interviewed before, haven't you, Graham?

Yeah. So well-known researcher, well-respected. He took a look and published a blog post about this.

He found that this camera was running a modified version of Android 8.1, which is an OS that was released in 2017 and no longer supported by Google.

Its patching was dated to June of 2018, and its underlying Linux kernel was also, in his words, ancient.

So in other words, this camera was watching modern traffic with software security that was from the 2010s.

Lee identified several publicly known vulnerabilities that are applicable to components of the device.

He saw flaws that could allow malicious software already running on the camera to gain deeper control. But then, sort of the chef's kiss of all this, are the credentials.

He found an API key hardcoded into a software library that's shared by 19 Flock applications that run on the camera.

So based on his analysis, that key is used during the process by which the cameras obtain their credentials for accessing Flock's backend infrastructure. So the—

On an unencrypted partition. Now I will say, as you and I are recording this, this API key has been making the rounds on social media. It is everywhere.

If you want to look for it, people are just posting and reposting, having the time of their lives posting this hardcoded key for Flock.

Obviously it's illegal to use this key to do what you want with Flock's API server, but do we know what you could do with this?

It seems as though this key is how the camera authenticates itself with Flock's mothership, if you will. So it says, this is who I am, this is where I am, which is another thing.

The camera sends its GPS coordinates to identify where it is.

And so with this information, you could basically authenticate yourself on Flock's API on their home base servers and pretend to be one of the remote cameras.

So the logs recovered from the camera contained GPS coordinates.

This particular camera seemed to have come from somewhere in Wisconsin, and researchers were able to use Google Street View to find the particular camera, I suppose, when it was still there.

Flock, of course, in response to the stories that have been written about this in places like 404 Media and Wired, they have said, and I quote, they take security seriously and they maintain a vulnerabilities disclosure programme.

Yeah.

So related to all of this, I think it's worth mentioning that there is a huge amount of pushback against these Flock cameras here in the States right now.

There are municipalities who have had contracts with them and are cancelling the contracts.

There is a story from a police organisation in Illinois where the former police chief and two of the other high-level police people in this police force were using the town's Flock licence plate cameras to monitor the police chief's ex-wife.

He had instructed other officers to track her, allegedly. The state police confirmed there's an active investigation into the matter.

Again, obviously all alleged, but these three police officers resigned from the force when this information came out. So again, there's a lot of pushback.

People feel as though this has gone a little too far, that our locations are being tracked. That the information is accessible without a warrant by police officers.

So I think the folks who make the Flock cameras have been set back on their heels a little bit at the amount of pushback there is.

And now to add on to that, these reports of how insecure and easy to hack both their cameras are and their central servers.

Yeah. These are devices which, sometimes it is argued, they are being introduced into society in order to protect us, to make us feel more secure.

But in fact, they're either being abused or they are themselves insecure in their very nature in the first place.

And to be fair, law enforcement will say this is a powerful tool for them to be able to solve crimes. And there's no question that that's true.

It's just a matter of how much are we all willing to give up in order to do that? And that's the unresolved question so far, but it's moving rapidly.

ThreatLocker puts default deny and least privilege between the agent and its next move. Application allowlisting decides what's allowed to run at all.

Ringfencing limits what trusted applications can reach or launch, and privileged access management takes away elevation the agent never needed in the first place.

Pick of the Week is the part of the show where everyone chooses something they like.

It could be a funny story, a book that they've read, a TV show, a movie, a record, a podcast, a website, or an app, whatever they wish.

It doesn't have to be security-related necessarily. Better not be. Now, Dave, I wonder if, like me, you are a fan of the movie La La Land.

For whatever reason, it just didn't resonate with me the way it did with other people, but that's okay. That's just me.

I have no doubt this is a wonderful movie, and clearly people love it, so good on them.

Well, I love La La Land. If you haven't seen it, of course, it was the movie which had the Best Picture Oscar cruelly ripped from its paws back in 2017.

If you haven't seen it, unlike Dave, who I'm beginning to question his judgement, I think you should go and watch it.

Tell me if you like it, and if you didn't like it, unsubscribe from Smashing Security immediately. Go on, clear off, clear off the lot of you.

Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, come. Come back. Didn't mean it.

Dave, don't leave just yet. You've got a few more minutes to go. All right. Anyway, if any of you are still listening, I love La La Land.

I could watch it on a loop, and my pick of the week this week is a website that is La La Land related.

So I've stumbled across a website called seeing-stars.com, and it's done something brilliant. They have tracked down literally every single filming location used in the movie.

So there's a real spot in Boulder City, Nevada, where Ryan Gosling goes to pick up Emma Stone when he visits her in her hometown.

There's a pier where he sings City of Stars to an old married couple and dances with the wife. There's the famous observatory.

I think it's in Rebel Without a Cause as well, or some James Dean movie.

Where they have their dreamy planetarium dance scene.

There's even tiny little throwaway moments, which may just be on the screen for a second, like a parking lot that Emma Stone walks through for an audition.

So this isn't a brief list. This is every single location throughout the movie. This La La Land lunatic has watched the movie with his pause button.

He's worked out where everything was taken.

It's extraordinary. And he's posted alongside the screencaps, real photos, map links, Street View. He's given a narrative as well.

There are so many pages of this, and I found myself trawling through this and I thought, you know what? This is the kind of obsessiveness I want to see on the internet.

This is like the old days. There used to be lots of bonkers sites like this.

And I don't think anyone's got enough time really these days. It doesn't feel like anyone's actually putting the effort into building something.

This was definitely not created — if you haven't seen La La Land, go watch La La Land for goodness' sake.

But also, after watching it, you might want to go and check out this website.

The other thing is, if La La Land isn't your thing, the same guy has documented all of the locations used in the Dexter TV series. You must know that one.

That's that family show about what a police blood spatter expert gets up to in his free time.

I grew up in a household that did not have a lot of musical sophistication. Let's put it that way.

My parents, who were children of the '50s, not the '60s, which meant they were more Frank Sinatra than the Beatles.

Yes, it is.

So for those who aren't familiar, the Ray Conniff Singers was just a group of vocalists, and they would take popular songs of the day, and they would get together as a choir, and they would sing the songs with an orchestral accompaniment.

And it was just completely benign, right?

So I say that as introduction to why I have great affection for a documentary that I came across recently. It's called Let's Have a Party: The Piano Genius of Mrs. Mills.

Graham, are you familiar with Mrs. Mills?

Which sounds bloody marvellous to me. And I think that's exactly the way I think about her as well.

It's the kind of roll-out-the-barrel music you can imagine in the corner of the pub.

There's no getting rid of me. So I've left a link to Let's Have a Party: The Piano Genius of Mrs. Mills, which is a BBC documentary.

But Graham, there's a particular thing in here that made me realise that this was the perfect thing to have as my pick of the week just for you, because Mrs.

Mills' piano is at Abbey Road Studios. To this day, her piano is there, and her piano was used by the Beatles.

But yeah, so many amazing songs.

I think maybe With a Little Help from My Friends and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da with that digga digga ding ding ding at the beginning — that's all on the Mrs. Mills piano.

This is fantastic. I'm definitely going to check out that documentary. I love that. Well, that just about wraps up the show for this week. Thank you so much, Dave, for joining us.

Maybe you can tell our listeners where they can follow you online and find out what you're up to. What's the best way for them to do that?

Terrific stuff. And of course, you can find me, Graham Cluley, on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, Instagram, and even the Tok of Tik. The list goes on.

And you can also follow Smashing Security on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Reddit. Don't forget to ensure you never miss another episode.

Follow Smashing Security in your favourite podcast apps such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Pocket Casts.

And you can look for our show notes, sponsorship info, guest list, and the entire back catalogue of 486 episodes at smashingsecurity.com.

Until a couple of weeks, not next week, the week after. Cheerio. Bye-bye.

You've been listening to Smashing Security with me, Graham Cluley, and a huge thank you to Dave Bittner for joining me this week and this week's sponsors ThreatLocker, Origin, and Vanta.

Do make sure to go and check out their offerings because they help keep the show afloat.

Now, chums, according to the limited stats I get to see as to our listenership, the vast majority of you appear to be male.

However, we do have a marvellous cohort of female listeners too, and some of them have been kind enough to become members of Smashing Security Plus. So I thought, you know what?

Let's give some of them a nice shout out today. So kicking us off are Jessica Orth, Lisa, and Sharon — three fine chums, not putting up with any nonsense.

A big huzzah to Sharon, a name which resembles that satisfying crisp click that you might get when closing the lid of a brand new laptop.

The legendary Maya MacDonald, the beautifully double-barrelled Adena Bogut O'Brien, and Jane with a Y, because why not?

Big love as well to The Green Girl, our most colour-coordinated patron, and to the delightfully whimsical Butterfly Skies. Thank you. And finally for this week, Frankie Guzikowski.

Frankly, Frankie can be a boy's name or a girl's name. I'm not sure which way our Frankie leans.

But anyway, these fine, upstanding, generous individuals are all members of Smashing Security Plus, which means they get their episodes ad-free earlier than the general public, and perhaps most importantly, have the opportunity to have their names pulled out of the hat at the end of the show and read out for mild ridicule.

Curated by myself.

If you would like to join them in this exclusive club of the wonderful and slightly foolish, just head over to smashingsecurity.com/plus, where for a modest fee, you too can support the podcast.

You can support us in other ways as well. You can write a review; those are always lovely. You can like, you can subscribe, and you can tell your friends about us.

Go on, go and find a chum. Collar them and say, you know what? You really should listen to Smashing Security.

Well, thanks to all of you who support the show, and I'll be back for another episode on October the 8th. So make sure to tune in then. Until then, cheerio. Bye-bye.