GoKawiilis a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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I’m lying in the dirt. It’s coming for me. Then, with a lurch, it’s climbing up my chest. If Andreas Makris doesn’t stop the 200-pound robot lawn mower in time, it could drag its blades across my body.
Makris certainly can’t reach over and hit the emergency stop button — he’s nearly 6,000 miles away, having hacked this robot from the other side of the planet, to demonstrate the gaping security holes in Yarbo’s robot lawn mowers. And I’ve made the questionable decision of lying down in the mower’s path — to see just how far Makris, the security researcher who discovered those flaws, is able to push the mower.
Yep, that’s me. Animation by Sean Hollister / The Verge
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.
“I can do whatever I want with all the bots,” Makris tells The Verge. “It’s completely unsecured.”
And believe it or not, remote control is just the tip of the iceberg.
Like Sammy Azdoufal, who made headlines worldwide when The Verge exclusively revealed how he made thousands of DJI Romo robot vacuum cleaners identify themselves and begin following his commands, Makris discovered that Yarbo’s robots do much the same thing. If you have access to one robot, you have access to them all.
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.
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