Hacked robotic vacuum cleaners hurl racial slurs at shocked owners, who react with “fear, disgust”

These vacuum cleaners did not have a filter.

Homeowners in the US were shocked when their Chinese-made robotic vacuum cleaners were hijacked and rewired to bombard them with racial slurs.

The racist attack affected Ecovacs Deebot X2s – a brand made in China – in several American cities, according to ABC News Australia.

Minnesota attorney Daniel Swenson said he was watching TV in May when his robotic vacuum cleaner started making sounds that initially “sounded like a broken radio signal or something,” he told the outlet.

“Maybe you could hear snippets of a voice,” recalled the litigant, who discovered on the vacuum cleaner’s app that a stranger had confiscated the camera’s live feed and the automated soot sucker’s remote control function.

Initially chalking it up to a glitch, Swenson reset his password, restarted the Deebot and sat down with his wife and 13-year-old son.

Then, like a horror movie, the cybernetic cleaner began to move and release a torrent of obscenities.

The vacuum cleaner allegedly yelled “f–k” followed by the n-word repeatedly in front of the family, ABC reported.

While certainly offensive, Swenson said he is grateful for Deebot’s speech as it allowed him to quickly deduce that there had been a breach.

The incident raised concerns about hackers silently watching him and his family through the dirt terminator, located on the same floor as the master bathroom.

“Our youngest kids shower there,” Swenson said. “I just thought about it catching my kids or even me, you know, without clothes on.”

Later, the miner took the vacuum cleaner to the garage and never turned it on again.

Unfortunately, Swenson’s Deebot wasn’t the only unit to go rogue.

Around the same time, an Ecovacs bot in El Paso, Texas, began shouting racial epithets at its owner late at night until he pulled the plug.

Meanwhile, another corrupted model chased a Los Angeles family’s dog around the house, like something out of a dystopian sci-fi thriller.

They should thank their lucky stars that their furry friend wasn’t vacuumed up by the android, as was the case with another unfortunate dog who required police rescue.

It’s unclear how many devices were affected or who the perpetrators were; however, Swenson suspects his harassers could have been teenagers playing a prank, judging by the bot’s voice.

He complained to Ecovacs about the infiltration, triggering an investigation that revealed hackers had likely bypassed Ecovacs’ security measures to confiscate the Deebots’ cameras, microphones and mobility controls, ABC reported.

The weakest link was a four-digit PIN, which could only be verified by the app, not the server or robot, thus allowing anyone with technical knowledge to bypass this protection.

An Ecovacs spokesperson said the flaw has now been fixed and promised to update the X2 in November.

However, the breach illustrates how easy it can be for bad actors to obtain data in our technology-saturated society.

Two years ago, servers that control robots working in hospitals were discovered to have large gaps in security coding, leaving them susceptible to exploitation by cybercriminals.

Even devices dedicated to keeping us safe aren’t necessarily safe.

In 2019, an Alabama man sued security camera company Ring after claiming a creep hijacked his device and taunted his children.