Free Republic

"It could have been worse," one owner incredibly concluded. It’s a tale as old as… the Internet of Things era. Robot vacuums made by Ecovacs have been reported roving around people’s homes, yelling profanities at them through the onboard speakers after the company’s software was found to be vulnerable to intrusion. ABC News in Australia reports that there were recently multiple instances across the U.S. when owners of Ecovacs vacuums noticed their devices acting unusually. “It sounded like a broken-up radio signal or something,” Daniel Swenson told the outlet. “You could hear snippets of maybe a voice.” He opened the...

Robot vacuums in multiple US cities were hacked in the space of a few days, with the attacker physically controlling them and yelling obscenities through their onboard speakers. The affected robots were all Chinese-made Ecovacs Deebot X2s — the exact model that the ABC was able to hack into as proof of a critical security flaw. Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson was watching TV when his robot started to malfunction. "It sounded like a broken-up radio signal or something," he told the ABC. "You could hear snippets of maybe a voice." Through the Ecovacs app, he saw that a stranger was...