Gaming: Guy Accidentally Takes Command Of 7,000 Robots In The Homes Of...

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Software engineer Sammy Azdoufal had a humble goal: He wanted to control his robot vacuum with a PS5 gamepad, because controlling things with a gamepad is cool. Shortly after pursuing that dream, however, Azdoufal found he had gained control of over 7,000 robots that were happy to provide him camera feeds and floor plans of strangers' homes in two dozen countries across the globe (via The Verge).

Azdoufal's field promotion to international robot commander occurred after tasking Claude Code with analyzing the traffic between his newly purchased DJI Romo vacuum and the manufacturer's servers. But when the security token it provided gave him access to not just his DJI Romo, but to all DJI Romos around the world, it was clear that he'd stumbled upon a glaring security flaw.

Every three seconds, Azdoufal's Claude-built app collected the serial numbers of thousands of robots pinging back to home base, reporting information about their cleaning routes, their charge states, obstacles they'd encountered. He could activate their on-board cameras and microphones. He could reconstruct the 2D floor plans of their owners' homes using their recorded spatial data. And with each machine's IP address, he could approximate the rough location of each robot vacuum's household.

Source: PC Gamer