These vacuum cleaners did not have filters.
Homeowners in the US were shocked after their Chinese-made robot vacuums were hijacked and rewired to bombard them with racial slurs.
A racist hacking attack affected the Ecovacs Deebot X2, a brand manufactured in China, in several American cities. ABC News Australia.
Daniel Swenson, a Minnesota attorney, said he was watching TV in May when his robot vacuum initially started making noises that sounded like “a radio signal or something cutting out.”
“I probably heard snippets of voices,” recalled a litigator who discovered on the vacuum cleaner's app that a stranger had commandeered the automatic soot sucker's live camera feed and remote control capabilities.
At first, Swenson thought it was a glitch, reset his password, restarted the Deebot, and sat down with his wife and 13-year-old son.
Then, just like in a horror movie, the cybernetic cleaner began to move, unleashing a flurry of obscenities.
ABC reported that the man repeatedly yelled the “fk” followed by the “n” word in front of his family.
Although certainly unpleasant, Swenson said he was ultimately grateful because Deebot's rant allowed him to quickly deduce that there had been a breach.
The incident raised concerns that hackers were quietly monitoring him and his family through a Dart Terminator located on the same floor as the master bathroom.
“Our youngest kids shower there,” Swenson said. “I just thought about my kids or myself getting caught up in that without clothes on.”
The Minnesotan then took the Dustbuster back to his garage and never turned it on again.
Unfortunately, Swenson's Deebots weren't the only unit to run amok.
Around the same time, an Ecovacs bot in El Paso, Texas, started yelling racial epithets at its owner in the middle of the night and was eventually suspended.
Meanwhile, another depraved model chased her Los Angeles family's dog around the house like in a dystopian sci-fi thriller.
You can be thankful your furry friend wasn't grabbed by the droids, as was the case with another unlucky dog who had to be rescued by the police.
ABC News
It is unclear how many devices were affected or who the perpetrators were. But Swenson suspects the harassers were prank teens, judging by the bot's voice.
He complained to Ecovacs about the intrusion, and an investigation revealed that the hacker likely took control of Deebot's camera, microphone, and movement controls, bypassing Ecovacs' security measures. ABC reported.
The weak link is the four-digit PIN, which can only be vetted by an app and not a server or robot, allowing anyone with technical expertise to circumvent this safeguard.
An Ecovacs spokesperson said the flaw has since been fixed and the company promised to upgrade the X2 in November.
Nevertheless, this breach shows how easy it is for bad actors to obtain data in our technology-saturated society.
Two years ago, it was discovered that the servers that control hospital robots had major flaws in their security coding, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by cybercriminals.
Even gadgets designed to keep us safe aren't necessarily safe.
In 2019, an Alabama man sued surveillance camera company Ring, claiming that something creepy took control of his device and toyed with his children.
