Robots seem to be turning against us, although not in the post-apocalyptic way we have long imagined.
Robotic vacuum cleaner owners in several US cities have reported that their cleaning machines have been hacked, with one man reporting that his vacuum began shouting racial slurs at him. A report from the Australian Broadcast Corporation attributes a security flaw in the Chinese-made Ecovacs Deebot X2 to hacks of the widely distributed machines.
Minnesota attorney Daniel Swenson told the outlet he was watching TV with his family when he noticed something strange happening with his vacuum.
“It sounded like a broken radio signal or something,” he told ABC. “You could hear snippets of maybe a voice.”
When he went to check his Ecovacs app, he saw a stranger messing with the remote control feature and the live camera.
He said he quickly reset his password and restarted the vacuum cleaner before returning to the couch with his wife and teenage son. That's when the real trouble started, with a loud, clear voice coming from the robot.
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“F—n——s!” the voice began to scream repeatedly.
TechCrunch reports that Ecovacs are apparently very easy to hack and have been a known issue for some time.
An August report from the technology news site said cybersecurity researchers analyzed the brand's security flaws and “found a number of issues that could be abused to hack the robots via Bluetooth and secretly turn on microphones and cameras remotely.”
“Their security was really, really, really bad,” researcher Dennis Giese told TechCrunch at the time.
When the outlet reached out to the company for information, an Ecovacs spokesperson said the company would not fix the flaws found by researchers, saying “users can rest assured that they do not need to be overly concerned about this.”
According to the ABC report, this recent hacking spree, which occurred in May, lasted a few days in several US cities, although it is not known how many of the vacuum cleaners (which sell for around 2,000 Canadian dollars) were affected.
The news outlet reports that an Ecovacs chased a dog into a home in Los Angeles, and five days later, another robot began hurling racial slurs at its owner in El Paso, Texas.
In a statement, Ecovacs said it found no evidence that any owners' accounts were hacked and there were no signs of a breach of Ecovacs' systems. However, researchers previously demonstrated how the four-digit PIN that protects the device could be bypassed, as it was only verified by the app and not the server or robot.
Ecovacs released a patch for this flaw, while ABC sources said it was insufficient.
However, the manufacturer said it will issue a security update to owners of the X2 series of robot vacuums in November.
