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It looks like the robots are turning against us, but not in the post-apocalyptic way we’ve long imagined.
Owners of robot vacuum cleaners in several US cities have reported that their cleaning machines have been hacked, with one man reporting that his vacuum cleaner started shouting racial slurs at him. A report from the Australian Broadcast Corporation points to a security flaw in the Chinese-made Ecovacs Deebot
Minnesota attorney Daniel Swenson told the newspaper that he was watching TV with his family when he noticed something strange happens with its vacuum.
“It sounded like a broken radio signal or something,” he told the ABC. “You could hear fragments of maybe a voice.”
When he went to check his Ecovacs app, he saw a stranger fiddling with the remote control function and the live camera.
He said he quickly reset his password and restarted the vacuum cleaner before returning to the bank with his wife and teenage son. Then the real trouble started, as a voice came through the robot loud and clear.
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“F— n——s!” the voice began to shout repeatedly.
TechCrunch reports that Ecovacs are apparently quite easy to hack and it has been a known problem for a while.
An August report from the tech news website said that cybersecurity researchers had analyzed the brand’s security flaws and found “a number of things that can be abused to hack the robots via Bluetooth and secretly turn on microphones and cameras remotely.”
“Their security was really, really bad,” researcher Dennis Giese told TechCrunch at the time.
When the outlet contacted the company for information, an Ecovacs spokesperson said the company would not repair the defects found by the researchers and say that “users can rest assured that they don’t have to worry too much about this.”
According to the ABC report, this recent hacking attack, which took place in May, lasted for a few days in multiple US cities, although it is not known how many of the vacuum cleaners (which retail for almost C$2,000) were affected.
The outlet reports that an Ecovacs chased a dog around a Los Angeles home and five days later, another robot began making racist comments at its owner in El Paso, Texas.
In a statement, Ecovacs said it had been found no proof that any owner accounts have been hacked and that there are no signs of any breach of Ecovacs’ systems. However, researchers have previously shown how the four-digit PIN that protects the device can be bypassed, as it is only controlled by the app and not by the server or robot.
Ecovacs has released a patch for this flaw, while ABC sources have said it is insufficient.
Yet the manufacturer has said that this will happen perform a security upgrade for the owners of the X2 series of robot vacuum cleaners in November.
© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
Michelle Butterfield
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