Owners of robotic vacuum cleaners in several US cities have reported their devices being hacked, causing the appliances to shout out obscenities, according to an ABC News report on Thursday.
A Minnesota lawyer named Daniel Swenson told the outlet that he was watching TV when his Chinese-made Ecovacs Deebot X2 started to malfunction. He said the noise coming from the robot – also known as a ‘roomba’ – initially sounded like a broken-up radio signal, with brief snippets of what sounded like a voice.
After seeing that a stranger had connected to the robot and was accessing its remote control feature, Swenson said he dismissed it as a glitch and rebooted the vacuum cleaner. However, shortly afterwards, it started moving again, and this time yelled racist obscenities through the speaker, saying “f* n***s” over and over again.
“I got the impression it was a kid, maybe a teenager [speaking],” Swenson told the outlet, suggesting that “maybe they were just jumping from device to device, messing with families.”
According to ABC, several similar hacking incidents have been reported in recent months across the US. In May, a hacked Deebot X2 vacuum cleaner in Los Angeles was reported to have chased its owner’s dog around the house, apparently being steered remotely, while swearing through its speakers.
The same month, an Ecovacs robot in El Paso, Texas, was reported as spewing out racial slurs until the owner unplugged it.
Prior to these incidents, ABC said security researchers had tried to notify Ecovacs of significant flaws in its vacuum cleaners and the app that is used to control them. Specifically, they flagged the robots’ Bluetooth controllers and PIN code system protecting the video feed and remote control feature. Cybersecurity experts have claimed that the four-digit PIN protecting the devices could be easily bypassed, because it was only being checked by the app and not the server or the robot.
Ecovacs has confirmed the account of Daniel Swenson since he filed his complaint. However, the company has suggested the incident was due to an unauthorized person accessing Swenson’s account and password, and not because Ecovacs’ own systems had been breached.
Nevertheless, the manufacturer has said that it will issue a security upgrade for the owners of the X2 series of robot vacuum cleaners in November.