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.
Security researchers Dennis Giese and Braelynn are due to speak at the Def Con hacking conference on Saturday detailing their research into Ecovacs robots. When they analyzed several Ecovacs products, the two researchers found a number of issues that can be abused to hack the robots via Bluetooth and surreptitiously switch on microphones and cameras remotely.
“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.
Most smarthome products are only worthwhile if they’re coupled with other devices in IFTTT style workflows. Like a morning routine where lights come on, the blinds open, and your playlist starts when you fist bump the air or yell “still alive”. A fan is stupid because you can control most fans from a smart plug, but a fan could come in handy for a grow operation, to maintain a level of humidity or whatever; coupled with a smart hygrometer/thermometer, irrigation, and server.
The problem is capitalism — every company tried to create their own walled gardens out of pure greed, so nobody except rich morons were willing to commit to automating their lives with a product/brand/platform that may not exist tomorrow, and won’t work with any other brand/platforms products, so all they’ve done is collectively hamstrung the entire markets growth, and created mountains of e-waste. Things are starting to move in a better direction, but until I can setup a cost-effective smarthome 100% offline, LAN only, managed by my own FOSS home server, I’m not gonna bother with anything more than a few standalone devices (e.g. pet-cam, mood lighting, etc).
I have that for several years now, with Tasmota devices and a Home Assistant server.
I am going one step further even: most of the logic continues to work even if the Home Assistant server is down. I just have less additional control by smartphone then, and less statistics.