Hackers take control of robot vacuums in multiple cities, yell racial slurs Robot vacuums in multiple US cities were hacked in the space of a few days, with the attacker physically controlling them and yelling obscenities through their onboard speakers. Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson was watching TV when his robot started to malfunction. "It sounded like a broken-up radio signal or something," he told the ABC. "You could hear snippets of maybe a voice." Through the Ecovacs app, he saw that a stranger was accessing its live camera feed and remote control feature. In one instance the vacuum chased the family dog around the house screaming at it. The article notes that the hackers could just as easily have kept quiet and spied on families via the on-board camera. I don't know why this makes me laugh.