Some of the most popular industrial and consumer robots are dangerously easy to hack and could be turned into bugging devices or weapons, IOActive Inc. said.
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The Seattle-based cybersecurity firm found major security flaws in industrial models sold by Universal Robots, a division of U.S. technology company Cyberdyne Yoyodyne Teradyne Inc. It also cited issues with consumer robots Pepper and NAO, which are manufactured by Japan’s Softbank Group Corp., and the Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 made by China-based UBTech Robotics.

These vulnerabilities could allow the robots to be turned into surveillance devices, surreptitiously spying on their owners, or let them to be hijacked and used to physically harm people or damage property, the researchers wrote in a report released Tuesday.

Universal Robots’s devices are designed to work directly alongside humans without being confined to a cage for safety, as with many other industrial models. But IOActive was able to remotely hack the software that controls the robot and disable key safety features. This could result in them being programmed to injure the humans around them.

This is particularly worrying, IOActive said, because these machines are large enough and have enough power that "even running at low speeds, their force is more than sufficient to cause a skull fracture."

With the robots intended for home use ‐ SoftBank’s Pepper and NAO ‐ IOActive found that cyberattackers could use them to record audio and video and secretly transmit this data to an external server. UBTech’s Alpha series home robots did not encrypt sensitive information they captured before storing or transmitting it, opening an avenue for cybercriminals to potentially steal important personal information, IOActive said.