Hacker Takes Over Robot Lawnmower, Runs Over Innocent Man

""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." Hollister, fortunately, wasn't harmed in the making of this article. Makris, a white hat hacker nearly 6,000 miles away in Germany, merely wanted to prove a point."

""I can do whatever I want with all the bots," Makris told The Verge. "It's completely unsecured." Even if someone pressed the emergency stop button, he added, a hacker like himself could send another command to turn it back on. Alarmingly, the Yarbo robots all had the same root password, Makris found. In theory, a black hat hacker who discovered this vulnerability could seize control of an entire army of Yarbo robots, since the security flaw is present in all of them."

"In fact, he created a map that showed the locations of over 11,000 Yarbo robots across the world, forming a global smart lawnmower panopticon. It raises the possibility for all kinds of havoc. Perhaps someone could pull off an impressively petty act of sabotage against a nemesis neighbor, or start creating crop circles around the country to stoke an old-fashioned UFO panic. Or they could use it to seriously harm someone or spy on them. Maybe they could even steal the autonomous lawnmowers."

A 200-pound autonomous robot lawn mower was remotely controlled by a hacker to demonstrate serious safety risks. The hacker found the robots were completely unsecured and could be controlled even if an emergency stop was pressed, because commands could be resent. All robots used the same root password, creating a vulnerability across the entire fleet. The hacker mapped locations of more than 11,000 robots worldwide, enabling a global surveillance and control capability. Potential misuse includes physical harm, sabotage, theft, and spying, making such vulnerabilities unacceptable for connected autonomous devices.

Read at Futurism