Robot vacuum cleaners hacked to spy on, insult owners

Robot vacuum cleaners hacked to spy on, insult owners(malwarebytes.com)

42 points by hampelm 1 year ago | 31 comments

dang 1 year ago |

Hacked Robot Vacuums Across the U.S. Started Yelling Slurs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815055 - Oct 2024 (1 comment)

Robot Vacuums Hacked to Shout Slurs at Their Owners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41812546 - Oct 2024 (1 comment)

Insecure Deebot robot vacuums collect photos and audio to train AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41753983 - Oct 2024 (37 comments)

ABC News hacks into popular robot vacuum, watches owner through camera - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41735871 - Oct 2024 (138 comments)

qmr 1 year ago |

It's almost like you shouldn't connect random ass appliances to the internet.

My ancient roombas clean just fine with no cameras, internet, or AI nonsense.

badgersnake 1 year ago | |

Yep, I was gonna say exactly the same thing. Don’t connect it to the internet, just don’t do it.

deepfriedchokes 1 year ago |

God bless these teenage degenerates and their endlessly creative fuckery. They bring more color to the world.

marcosdumay 1 year ago | |

More importantly, they are raising consciousness of fundamental problems that can lead to very damaging consequences by doing cheap pranks with trivial consequences.

deepfriedchokes 1 year ago | | |

Yeah these security holes they exposed were huge! I hope the company gets sued.

Lulz are a really cheap bounty program and a lot of kids value the opportunity to be a shitass way more than money.

woodrowbarlow 1 year ago | |

... for invading someone's privacy and screaming racist obscenities in their home? i vehemently disagree.

guestbest 1 year ago | | |

I use a robot vacuum not connected to the internet. It has a remote and the same settings as an internet connected robot vacuum such as radial pattern, along edges, spot clean, etc. I hope it spurs people to consider these kinds of tools that don’t need to be connected to the internet to function over tools that don’t have a local/offline mode.

woodrowbarlow 1 year ago | | |

this whole subthread is upsetting. horrifying to see HN glorify the antagonist. the family was made to feel unsafe in their own home. yes, the manufacturer was negligent but that does not make it okay, it just means multiple parties are at fault. don't spin roomba terrorists as do-gooders. this teenage hacker was spreading hate and fear.

Rygian 1 year ago | | |

Consider the alternatives. Anyone else exploiting such a vulnerability would have worse intentions.

beAbU 1 year ago | | |

Getting racist slurs yelled at me by my robot vacuum is arguably the best outcome imaginable if someone hacked it.

hulitu 1 year ago | | |

> ... for invading someone's privacy and screaming racist obscenities in their home? i vehemently disagree.

"someone's privacy" was already raped by the company selling the product. If a random kid can see in your house, everybody can see.

"I have nothing to hide" i suppose./s

delichon 1 year ago |

My Roborock has a three button combination you have to press on the bot to enable remote viewing. I suppose once you do that all bets are off. But at least it requires access to the hardware and is off by default. Better if you could configure it to disable again after each use or periodically.

I'd really want this feature to keep an eye on my pets if I work away from home again. I could see buying a bot just for that.

joe_the_user 1 year ago | |

How do you know those buttons go to hardwired switches rather than being controlled by software that could be remotely hacked?

amelius 1 year ago | | |

My thought exactly.

iAMkenough 1 year ago | |

My pup would be tormented by the vacuum following it around while I'm not there. She gets freaked out enough by a stationary PTZ camera on my bookshelf.

gnabgib 1 year ago |

Related Insecure Deebot robot vacuums collect photos and audio to train AI (82 points, 15 days ago, 37 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41753983

gedy 1 year ago |

These darn things don't need to be "cloud enabled", or even wifi. Please make them Bluetooth, etc only.

These dopey use cases of needing to trigger a cleaning while miles away have always seemed like a stretch.

Syonyk 1 year ago | |

Right. But the actual use case of being able to sell your home's floorplan and general cleaning schedule/behaviors/etc to advertisers requires cloud functionality, so you need some fig leaf to cover up the requirement...

I agree, local only would be great. But that's not aligned with the "sell a product once, sell the data collected forever!" model that most modern consumer tech products operate on.

amelius 1 year ago | |

Even if they're Bluetooth-only: AdTech will invent some way to send Ethernet packets over it, sooner than you might expect.

accrual 1 year ago | | |

Maybe a step further for privacy: a physical "config mode" toggle on top of the vacuum that enables the BlueTooth radio for a point-to-point connection with the phone app, then toggle it back when you're done. Wouldn't prevent the vacuum from caching data during its work and sending it when in config mode though, I suppose.

LinuxBender 1 year ago |

Maybe the fact it shows how these devices can spy might educate people on what IoT's are doing all day every day in their homes and around their kids. Would this be considered hactivism?

I'm half curious if they got some of the idea from Michael Reeves [1].

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvz3LRK263E [video][11 mins][language, wear headphones maybe]

dijit 1 year ago |

I’m immediately envisioning the watch dogs 2 “jumper” bot.

https://youtu.be/f5oKFufx2Z0?si=xGMEkAMZRgIqJuH_

moepstar 1 year ago |

Put Valetudo on it - https://valetudo.cloud/

Robot incompatible? That’d be a hard pass…

jbaber 1 year ago | |

This looks great. Hard to find used robots it supports.

moepstar 1 year ago | | |

Uhm, Valetudo supports 35 different robots: https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html

Maybe not the model you’re looking for, but saying that you’re unable to find used, supported robots?

jowea 1 year ago |

I was almost starting to think hacking had gotten too professional and commercialized for script kiddies to exist.

accrual 1 year ago | |

If anything, I'd expect it to proliferate with the easy access to GitHub and now LLMs. When I was a script kiddie we had to find tools on various forums attached as a .zip/.tgz and hope the supplied .exe/bin wasn't a virus. :)