These vacuums had no filter.
U.S. homeowners were shocked when their Chinese-made robot vacuums were hijacked and rewired to bombard them with racial slurs.
The racist hack attack affected Ecovacs Deebot X2s — a brand that’s manufactured in China — across several American cities, per ABC News Australia.
Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson said he was watching TV in May when his robo-vacuum started to emit sounds that initially “sounded like a broken-up radio signal or something,” he told the outlet.
“You could hear snippets of maybe a voice,” recalled the litigator, who discovered on the vac’s app that a stranger had commandeered the automated soot sucker’s live camera feed and remote control function.
Initially attributing it a glitch, Swenson reset his password, rebooted the Deebot, and sat down with his wife and 13-year-old son.
Then, like a horror movie, the cybernetic cleaner started to move and unleash a stream of obscenities.
The vac reportedly screamed “f–k” followed by the n-word over and over again in front of the family, ABC reported.
While certainly offensive, Swenson said he’s ultimately grateful for the Deebot’s tirade as it allowed him to quickly deduce that there’d been a breach.
The incident raised concerns about hackers silently observing him and his fam through the dirt terminator, which was located on the same floor as the master bathroom.
“Our youngest kids take showers in there,” said Swenson. “I just thought of it catching my kids or even me, you know, not dressed.”
The Minnesotan subsequently took the dust-buster to the garage and never turned it on again.
Unfortunately, Swenson’s Deebot wasn’t the only unit to go rogue.
Around the same time, an Ecovacs bot in El Paso, Texas, started yelling racial epithets at its owner late at night until they pulled the plug.
Meanwhile, another corrupted model chased a Los Angeles family’s dog around their home like something out of a dystopian science-fiction thriller.
They should thank their lucky stars the furry friend wasn’t hoovered up by the droid, as was the case with another unfortunate pooch that required rescue by the police.
ABC News
It’s unclear how many devices were affected or who the perpetrators were; however, Swenson suspects that his harassers could have been teens playing a prank, judging by the bot’s voice.
He complained to Ecovacs about the infiltration, prompting an investigation that revealed that the hackers had likely bypassed Ecovacs’ security measures to commandeer the Deebots’ cameras, microphones and locomotion controls, ABC reported.
The weak link was a four-digit PIN, which could only be vetted by the app, rather than by the server or robot, thereby allowing anyone with technical expertise to circumvent this safeguard.
An Ecovacs spokesperson said the flaw has since been fixed and pledged to upgrade the X2 in November.
Nonetheless, the breach illustrates how easy it can be for bad actors to obtain data in our tech-saturated society.
Two years ago, servers that control robots working in hospitals were found to have major gaps in security coding, leaving them susceptible to exploitation by cybercriminals.
Even gadgets dedicated to keeping us safe aren’t necessarily secure.
In 2019, an Alabama man sued security camera company Ring after claiming that a creep hijacked his device and taunted his kids.