Name: Casual hacker.
age: It doesn’t matter how old Sammy Azdoufal is. What he did is important here, and what he did is very old.
what else did do azdoufal? He connected his DJI Romo vacuum cleaner to his PS5 controller.
Why? Because, he told New York-based tech news publication The Verge, it looked like fun.
well, to each his own. And how did he do it? They used an AI coding assistant, Cloud Code, to reverse-engineer how a home robot vacuum communicates with DJI’s remote cloud server…
Wow, you’re losing me. To be honest, I am also losing myself. Look, Azdoufal is a software engineer, he’s the head of AI strategy at a holiday rental company, he knows how to do this stuff. But the interesting thing is what happened next…
what happened next? Probably lying on the couch and directing his vacuum cleaner with his joystick – which sounds really fun, even if it kind of negates the whole point of the robot a bit.. He found that not only could he control his robot, but he gained access to data from other robot vacuum cleaners.
What type of data? Live camera feeds, microphone audio, maps from nearly 7,000 devices in 24 countries.
tinker tailor cleaner detective! Even if unknowingly. But yes, Azdoufal did discover a backend security bug that could mean whole swarms of web-connected vacuum cleaners/surveillance devices could be spying on their owners without them even realizing it.
Incredible! What did he do with such power? As I said, he took it His findings for the Verge. One of its journalists gave Azdoufal the serial number of the DJI Romo vacuum he was currently testing for review; Within minutes Azdoufal saw it cleaning the reporter’s living room, had 80% battery life left, and had generated and broadcast a floor plan of the house.
That’s terrible. Is there a possibility that there could be a more nefarious actor than Azdoufal Use These Robot Vacuum Cleaners to Spy on Us? Chinese company DJI – Shenzhen Da-Jiang Innovation Sciences & Technologies Ltd. – initially told The Verge that the problem had been “resolved”, but according to Azdoufal, DJI had not fixed all the vulnerabilities found. Since The Verge published its report, DJI has also been in touch Popular Science Says the Problem Has Been “Solved”.
Of course he did. But this incident certainly highlights some warnings and fears about smart home devices and robots and how they could become targets for hackers. Or maybe they already are…
Must say: “Yeah, I know you have those eyes and that scary smile, but I’m with you, Henry. Because you can’t really see… can you?”
Don’t say: “You missed the corner a little – yes, you there, in Taipei. And we are watching…”
