The robots appear to be turning on us, albeit not in the apocalyptic way we frequently imagine.
In various U.S. cities, owners of robot vacuums have reported that their devices have been compromised, with one person stating that his vacuum started yelling racial slurs.
A report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) attributes the hacks of these widely used machines to a security vulnerability in the Chinese-manufactured Ecovacs Deebot X2.
Daniel Swenson, a lawyer from Minnesota, recounted to the ABC how he was watching television with his family when he noticed something unusual with his vacuum.
“It sounded like a broken-up radio signal or something,” he said.
Upon checking the Ecovacs app, he discovered an unfamiliar person tampering with its remote control and live camera features.
He quickly reset his password and rebooted the vacuum before returning to the sofa with his wife and teenage son.
That’s when the absolute chaos began, as a voice came through the robot loud and clear.
“F— n——s!” the voice started shouting repeatedly.
TechCrunch reports that Ecovacs devices are vulnerable to hacking, a concern that has been recognized for some time.
An August report from the tech news site indicated that cybersecurity researchers had been examining the brand’s security issues and “found a number of issues that can be abused to hack the robots via Bluetooth and surreptitiously switch on microphones and cameras remotely.”
“Their security was really, really, really, really bad,” researcher Dennis Giese told TechCrunch then.
When the outlet contacted the company for comment, a spokesperson for Ecovacs stated that they would not address the flaws identified by the researchers, assuring users that “users can rest assured that they do not need to worry excessively about this.”
According to the ABC report, this recent wave of hacking incidents, which occurred in May, lasted several days across various U.S. cities, although the exact number of affected vacuums (which retail for nearly C$2,000, approximately £1,100, $1,300, €1,250, or $2,000 AUD) remains unclear.
The report mentions an Ecovacs vacuum that chased a dog around a home in Los Angeles, followed five days later by another unit in El Paso, Texas, which began shouting racial slurs at its owner.
In response, Ecovacs claimed there was no evidence of hacked owner accounts or of a breach within Ecovacs’ systems.
However, researchers had previously demonstrated that the four-digit PIN protecting the device could be easily bypassed, as it was only verified by the app and not by the server or the robot itself.
Although Ecovacs issued a patch to address this vulnerability, sources from ABC reported that it was inadequate.
Nevertheless, the manufacturer announced plans to upgrade the security for X2 series robot vacuum owners in November.