Robot vacuum from prominent brand has cameras and speakers hacked, according to report

Robot vacuums are becoming more capable of correctly and completely cleaning floors for their human users. But are they really trustworthy in other, more crucial ways?

Sean Kelly, a resident of Brisbane, Australia, apparently took part in an experiment to determine if the robot vacuum he had in his home for “the better part of a year” could be “hacked” by a “payload” supplied by Dennis Giese, a “independent security and privacy researcher”.

It reportedly allowed journalist Julian Fell to hijack the robot vacuum from a park outside the fourth-floor office in which the robot was located, gaining accessing to all its functions “logs, WiFi credentials and…full network access” included.

Both Fell and Giese were able to view video and photos taken with the device’s inbuilt camera, even though the latter was located in Berlin, Germany – thousands of miles away from its location. The attackers also claimed to be able to co-opt the vacuum’s speaker in order to send a “creepy” message Kelly’s way (“Hello Sean…I’m waaaatching you….”).

The vacuum in question – identified as a Deebot X2 from Ecovacs – did not apparently even play a warning noise when its camera was activated. Its OEM responded with claims that there is no reason for its users to “worry excessively” when Giese’s findings were made public in December 2023, as “specialised hacking tools and physical access” are required to breach the device’s data security.

Nevertheless, the researcher asserts that it took nothing more than wireless access to compromise the V2 (currently priced at $949.99 on Amazon). On the other hand, Giese does concede that physical access – and sometimes even a partial teardown – is indeed required to ‘hack’ other robot vacuums.

Ecovacs has publicly committed to fixing its “security issues”, but has yet to update all of its vacuums accordingly, its latest model of the time included. As for the V2 itself, its vulnerabilities will reportedly be patched, but not until November 2024.

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