A truck robbery occurred in Bohemia, New York, in February of last year, News 12 Long Island reported. Frank Facompre, owner of FMF Construction, lost everything from the trucks: equipment, cordless tools, his foreman's tools, and even his employees' personal belongings. In Warren, Michigan, later in 2022, another small business had its pickup truck and equipment trailer stolen for a loss of $35,000, reported Fox 2 Detroit.
Work truck robberies are a common occurrence, and a quick search on Google will lead to thousands of results. One company wants to change that.
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On Oct. 30, Canopy Security, a smart vehicle security startup, announced the launch of a vehicle security camera. The Canopy Pickup Cam is a connected security camera that provides real-time video monitoring of a pickup bed.
Canopy, a joint venture between Ford Motor Company and security company ADT, was created to combat the theft and loss of tools from the vehicles of individuals employed in the trade professions. The Pickup Cam is Canopy's solution.
"The idea was to take some of these cameras ... that are going on vehicles and turning them into security cameras," Frank Gall, VP of sales at Canopy, told Fleet Maintenance's sister publication, FleetOwner.
The product is a device that easily installs onto the inside back window of a pickup truck and records live feeds of the pickup bed and its surroundings. Owners can view this feed from a mobile app to monitor their vehicle, and the app will also alert them if the camera detects someone near the bed. Using an algorithm like that of Nest doorbells, Gall said pickup owners can "train" the system so that they are only notified if there is an "actual intrusion event."
Along with the product launch, Canopy partnered with Israeli-based Upstream to help support the product.
Protecting your equipment and your data
Upstream is a cybersecurity and data management platform for connected vehicles and smart mobility firm that has already partnered with several companies in the automotive and commercial vehicle space, such as Amazon Web Services with its Independent Software Vendor Accelerate Program, ServiceNow, BlackBerry Limited, Ford, and ChargeIQ to name a few.
Upstream constantly monitors data from fleet vehicles and personal vehicles, checking for anomalies that could be security threats. Canopy became interested in partnering with Upstream, Gall said, because of its current relationships with Ford and other top OEMs.
The Canopy Pickup Cam records and captures security footage and data. Canopy wanted to partner with Upstream to take advantage of "the cybersecurity that comes with protecting the data that we're capturing," Gall told FleetOwner. "So, we're looking for Upstream to help us protect that data, protect our APIs—a lot of back-end things you don't see."
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But Canopy's goal with the Upstream partnership isn't simply for the here and now. Canopy hopes to leverage Upstream's cybersecurity solutions with its security footage data to eventually offer fleets "a complete, holistic view" of their vehicle assets and the tools inside them, according to Gall. He believes that this solution, if implemented across a fleet, will eventually help fleets lower their insurance premiums, similar to the way ADT home protection lowers a homeowner's insurance premium. And the partnership with Upstream is integral to Canopy reaching that goal.
Canopy already has "anecdotal interest from insurance companies," Gall told FleetOwner. "Now it's just a matter of building out that model with actual data, and that's what we're partnering with Upstream to do."
How Canopy and Upstream work together
The Canopy Pickup Cam is an Application Programming Interface, which means the device installed on a vehicle communicates to Canopy through a cellular connection and then transmits that video feed to an app on the owner's phone, much like any other app on a smartphone. Although installing API-driven technology onto vehicles—along with sharing data with telematics companies and fleet management systems—can increase operational efficiency, help deter theft, and increase fleet safety, APIs are vulnerable to cyberattacks.
This is where the Upstream cybersecurity solution shines, Shira Sarid-Hausirer, vice president of marketing at Upstream, told FleetOwner, because it analyzes that communication—or data "transaction"—by cross-referencing and correlating between both information technology data streams and operational technology data streams.
Canopy, as an API and a mobile application, sends its data to Upstream, but it also has its own algorithm, the digital alert it sends if an intrusion is detected, and that data is eventually also fed into the Upstream system to correlate together, Frank Domanico, Upstream's director of sales for North America, told FleetOwner. Once Upstream ingests that data, it goes through a process of profiling it, cleansing it, and then encrypting it for the customer or the OEM using an algorithm.
Upstream then applies detection. It uses security detection either through the customers' specifications, such as user-defined detectors that fleets and OEMs can develop themselves, or through Upstream's own set of detectors. Once a detector is triggered, Upstream receives an alert.
An example of an anomaly detected is an "unlock" command received on a vehicle's app while the vehicle is in motion. If the driver or the fleet owner uses Upstream, the Upstream security team will be able to see that behavior, see if the location of the vehicle matches the location of the command, and then take appropriate action to eliminate any risk.
APIs, being easier to hack than vehicles themselves, hold sensitive information that must be protected. Therefore, as "Canopy protects the actual truck," Sarid-Hausirer said, "we protect Canopy to make sure that the entire solution is resilient."
Currently, Canopy's pickup security device, protected by Upstream, is available for light-duty pickup trucks. Canopy aims to release a security camera solution for cargo vans in 2024.
This article was originally published on FleetOwner.com.
