- A wrapped Toyota Yaris reportedly confused a Flock camera at Def Con.
- The camera recorded the car but apparently failed to classify it.
- An earlier plate sticker showed a subtler way to disrupt automated reads.
A 2009 Toyota Yaris isn’t the sort of thing that usually counts as breaking news, even if it’s one wrapped in a vinyl that looks lifted from a 1990s jetski brochure. Still, that’s exactly what we have here because the manic design on this little car did something few can. It fooled an automatic license plate reader.
Read: Cameras Logged Everything About Your Car And Made It Public
Cybersecurity researcher Bill Swearingen says the AI-generated pattern fooled a Flock camera during a public test at Def Con in Las Vegas. Swearingen, founder of SIXCYBER, has spent roughly a year developing the noRecognition project. His system generates so-called adversarial patterns, which look like chaotic designs to people but can confuse computer-vision software.
He told TechCrunch that he ran around 31 million tests before wrapping the Toyota and driving it past a Flock camera at the hacking conference. While the camera could see the car, it didn’t classify it as one. A Flock camera is not just a license plate reader. Flock says its system can also identify a vehicle by its make, model, color, body style, damage, roof racks, decals, and other visible details. In other words, whether it can see the plate or not, it can, in theory, still identify a specific vehicle.
Swearingen’s wrap targets that broader detection layer. The claim is not that it blinds the camera or makes the car invisible in the footage. Rather, the system does not reliably flag what it sees as a car in the first place. The public demonstration is encouraging for his project, but it is still a single test, and Donut Media, which presented the car, has yet to release the video surrounding it.
This sort of tech isn’t new. Journalist Benn Jordan recently showed off a clear plate sticker that stayed readable to the human eye while scrambling the software trying to detect and read the characters. That was the quieter trick. No whole-car camouflage, no Yaris in a wrap that every driver on the road would clock. Just a small sticker that even police probably wouldn’t flag from directly behind it. Pair the sticker with the wrap, and the cameras might never catch up.
