Sammy Azdoufal was surprised when 7,000 robot vacuum cleaners from all around the world suddenly started treating him like he was their boss and started controlling them
A man freaked out after he accidentally took remote control of an army of 7,000 robot vacuum cleaners worldwide.
Spanish software engineer Sammy Azdoufal was trying to control his new DJI Romo vacuum with his Playstation 5 earlier this month, The Verge reported. But soon he realised that his makeshift control app remote control app started communicating with DJI’s servers.
And it wasn’t just one or two robots that replied – around 7,000 of the machines from across the globe began inexplicably treating Azdoufal like he was their boss. The baffled tech head soon realised he could watch the vacuums’ live camera feeds, collecting over 100,000 messages from the devices and working out their approximate location. Azdoufal said he wasn’t trying to hack into the other devices, claiming he contacted The Verge to tell them about the system’s vulnerability.
DJI has since reported it has fixed the problem, but a random bloke temporarily controlling an army of machines is worrying news to say the least. Azdoufal sounds like a reasonable man, but there could be evil hackers out there who might use that power for bad.
It comes as experts have warned “security is a bit of an afterthought” when it comes to tech companies who manufacture similar products to the DJI robots.
Alan Woodward, a professor of computer science at England’s University of Surrey, said in an interview Tuesday: “There is this idea that you move fast and break things, and you have got to innovate to be in the market, to be the cheapest, to have new features.
“But the trouble is, the lesson was learned very early on in software development, that if you do that, you will end up with security vulnerabilities.”
While people buy such gadgets to simplify their lives, hackers have ironically also found it simpler to breach people’s privacy. Beyond the vacuum cleaners, hackers have managed to operate lighting systems, locks, security cameras, a baby monitor and a heating system, according to research in the Journal of Information Security and Applications.
Regarding the vacuum cleaners, Azdoufal could seize control of them because the login details for his device enabled him to access the others.
Firms can prevent this problem by requiring consumers to create their own passwords before operating a product for the first time, Woodward said.
Manufacturers also need to guarantee that people designing, constructing and coding software are “fully aware of how security can be compromised”, Woodward said. “It’s not just somebody writing one element of the software.”
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