Hacker Takes Over Robot Lawnmower, Runs Over Innocent Man (Futurism article, 5/8, based on a 5/7 Verge srticle)

[highplainsdem]

https://futurism.com/robots-and-machines/hacker-robot-lawnmower-runs-over-man

https://www.theverge.com/tech/925696/yarbo-robot-lawn-mower-hack-remote-control-camera-access-mqtt

These things - Chinese-made Yarbo robot lawnmowers - are dangerous, and incredibly easy to hack.

From Futurism:

Is building autonomous robots equipped with sharp oscillating blades that roam your front yard a good idea? What about connecting them to the internet?

We’ll tell you what’s definitely a bad idea: leaving these machines painfully vulnerable to hackers.

Just ask reporter Sean Hollister for The Verge, who suddenly found himself on the, uh, verge of experiencing a grisly incident after someone took control of his Yarbo robot lawn mower.

“I’m lying in the dirt. It’s coming for me. Then, with a lurch, it’s climbing up my chest,” Hollister wrote in a riveting new piece for the outlet. “If Andreas Makris doesn’t stop the 200-pound robot lawn mower in time, it could drag its blades across my body.”

-snip-

Makris does stop it in time. He's a white hat hacker, easily hacking the robot from 6,000 miles away in Germany.

Much more at that link, and no paywall.


From The Verge - and there's video of the robot running over the Verge editor:

By the time the mower touches my body, Makris has already proven his point: the $5,000 robot lawn mowers from Yarbo have such ridiculous security vulnerabilities that a foreign hacker can easily hijack a bladed gadget in the United States. And not just one. Thousands upon thousands of bladed Chinese robots at his beck and call. Every Yarbo robot around the world, whether configured to churn through grass, snow, or weeds, is theoretically reporting to him now.

-snip-

And believe it or not, remote control is just the tip of the iceberg.

-snip-

But these robots have blades — and hackers can use the robot’s built-in commands to override its safety features. Even if you press that big red emergency stop button on the mower itself, a hacker can send another command to unlock it, Makris says.

And because the Yarbo is a full Linux computer, one with its own backdoor and where the root password is always the same, hackers could remotely reprogram it to do anything: spin up the blades, probe your home network, turn your robot into part of a botnet to harass targets on the internet.

-snip-

This robot is an all-in-one yard robot with attachments to turn it into a lawn mower, leaf blower, snowblower, trimmer, and edger. It has a camera, and a hacker can guide it anywhere its treads will take it. The hacker found 12 different Yarbo robots within a couple of miles of power plants. The hacker can get the robot owners' email addresses, wifi passwords, and GPS coordinates for their house.

Each Yarbo robot has the same hardcoded root password. The owner can change it, but the next update sets it back to the original password. And Yarbo created a remote-access backdoor that can't be disabled and is restored if removed somehow.

[SheltieLover]

1. Omg

[Norrrm]

2. Remotely drive it down the street a couple of blocks to a waiting truck and steal it.

Too easy?

[RB77]

3. An Army of 100,000 Lawn Mowers-

Closing in on The Pentagon- might loose some sleep tonight. 🤓

[GenThePerservering]

4. Oh man - a hardcoded password. STOOPID

I like my mechanical push-mower.