Ecovacs Home Robots Can Be Hacked To Spy On Their Owners

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Malicious hackers can take over control of vacuum and lawn mower robots made by Ecovacs to spy on their owners using the devices' cameras and microphones, new research has found.

"Their security was really, really, really, really bad," Giese told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the talk.

The researchers said they reached out to Ecovacs to report the vulnerabilities but never heard back from the company, and believe the vulnerabilities are still not fixed and could be exploited by hackers.

The main issue, according to the researchers, is that there is a vulnerability that allows anyone using a phone to connect to and take over an Ecovacs robot via Bluetooth from as far away as 450 feet (around 130 meters). And once the hackers take control of the device, they can connect to it remotely because the robots themselves are connected via Wi-Fi to the internet.

"You send a payload that takes a second, and then it connects back to our machine. So this can, for example, connect back to a server on the internet. And from there, we can control the robot remotely," said Giese. "We can read out to Wi-Fi credentials, we can read out all the [saved room] maps. We can, because we're sitting on the operation of the robot's Linux operating system. We can access cameras, microphones, whatever."