Robot Vacuum Starts Hurling Racial Slurs at Its Owner After Being Hacked

“I just thought of it catching my kids or even me, you know, not dressed.”

Foul Language

Hackers were able to gain control of camera-equipped robot vacuums around the United States — and at least one of them forced the cleaning robots to yell racist obscenities.

As ABC Australia reports, owners of Ecovacs’ Deebot X2 robot vacuums from Los Angeles to El Paso, Texas told the broadcaster that their wares had exhibited strange behaviors.

But one story stuck out as particularly egregious. Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson told the ABC that he initially thought his Chinese-made robot vacuum was malfunctioning when he began to hear weird sounds coming from it. When he went to check out the problem on the robot’s app, however, he found someone else was accessing its camera and remote control settings.

Attempting to do due diligence, Swenson reset the vacuum’s password — only for it to begin zooming around and yelling the N-word repeatedly, all within earshot of one of his children.

After that incident, Swenson turned the robot vacuum off and never turned it back on.

Later, he realized that despite the coarse language, the hack could’ve been much worse. As he explained, the Ecovac had been in use on the same floor as his family’s master bathroom and the hackers could easily have seen something they weren’t supposed to.

“I just thought of it catching my kids or even me,” Swenson said, “you know, not dressed.”

It was, perhaps, a best-case scenario for this sort of thing — but given that the company behind the breached bots was warned multiple times about their vacuums’ vulnerabilities, it shouldn’t have happened at all.

Fair Warning

At the end of 2023, a pair of white hat hackers revealed that Ecovacs’ Deebots were really easy to hack into because it stores users’ PIN codes in its app. With enough technical know-how, anyone could access those codes and remotely control the robo-vacs, even after they were reset.

Earlier this month, the ABC employed Daniel Giese, one of the white hat hackers who presented on the Ecovacs’ vulnerabilities, to replicate his findings. He was able to do so with ease, showing the Australian broadcaster’s reporters how simple it was to watch live through its remote-controlled lens.

The company had been informed of this hackability and had even received several complaints from others that the ABC spoke to in Australia and the US. Yet, its spokespeople acted surprised when Swenson contacted them about his experience.

Since the publication of this latest report, Ecovacs has claimed it “resolved” the vulnerability, but Giese told the broadcaster that holes still remained.

As far as anyone knows, hackers could still be accessing these camera-equipped robots, watching their footage, and using their microphones to shout offensive or creepy things at their owners.

More on hacks: Russian Hackers Are Using Fake AI “Nudify” Sites to Steal Data