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