Holy robot (vacuum) army Batman!

Last week it was dancing Chinese robots. This week a French gamer hijacks 7,000 robo‑vacuums. Accidentally. Skynet, anyone?

(first published on my substack )

The 7,000 nation army.

You drop two grand on a robot vacuum so you can kick back and stop chasing furballs and dust. You do not expect it to quietly sign up for a 7,000‑strong robot army you’ve never met.

French gamer and tech-head Sammy Azdoufal just wanted to drive his flagship DJI Romo vacuum with a gaming joystick. Hey, who hasn’t!

Full disclosure: I’ve never owned a robot vacuum, and my gaming career tapped out at Resident Evil on the PS3. But even I admit, Xbox‑ing a home appliance would be pretty cool.

But he didn't have the coding smarts to get his gaming handpiece talking to his Romo.

No worries. It’s 2026. Just get Claude Code to bust out the hacking software for you.

And then the (scary) fun started.

His gaming controller didn’t just see his Romo. It could access nearly 7,000 others spread across 24 countries.

 

Tinker, tailor, vacuum, spy.

Modern robot cleaners don’t slide around the living room like drunk dustpans.

They build detailed maps of your place so they know where the kitchen ends, the bedroom begins, and the Lego minefield lives.

Now while Azdoufal couldn’t steer anyone else’s vac, he ended up on the common servers hosting live camera feeds and the ability to activate microphones.

The images were detailed enough that he could generate 2D floor plans of strangers’ homes and even guess rough locations from IP addresses.

To make things even spicier, we are talking DJI vacuums.

Yep the one and the same Chinese company that’s been grilled in parliaments and congresses around the world over the data‑governance and national‑security worries posed by the millions of foreign‑made  cameras deployed across western industries and homes.

DJI told PopSci the bug has now been fixed. Cheers, thanks.

Coding schmoding.

Azdoufal denies he was “hacking.” He was tinkering with his own device and found a door somebody forgot to lock.

To his credit, he freaked out with a friend, emailed DJI, looped in The Verge, and didn’t start blackmailing people via their robot mop.

He “simply stumbled upon a major security issue” while trying to drive his vacuum like a remote‑control car.

And note, Sammy didn’t have the skills to write the code himself. A salient point here is that, in 2026, that no longer matters.

Claude Code and its vibe-coding buddies have lowered the bar of entry to potential cyber baddies to the point where so long as you play nasty you can get the algorithms to do the heavy lifting for you!

The spy who cleaned me.

I’m not saying never go to JB Hi‑Fi again. And yes, these devices have ushered in an era of convenience for all of us.

But in our mega‑connected age, the next time you splurge on some high‑end tech, do a tiny bit of due diligence on what you’re letting into your world. Don’t just check out how many megapixels it has.

If you’re about to bring some shiny new gadget home, take five minutes to Google “security concerns” plus the brand name. It’s not perfect, but do a quick background check on your new stranger with wheels and a camera.

If companies treat identity and access for robots as an optional extra, we’ll keep discovering that one bored nerd with an AI co‑pilot can see more of our lounge rooms than our mates ever will.

So by all means let the vacuum map your house. Just don’t forget those images end up somewhere.

And maybe, for everyone’s sake, don’t wave at it from the shower.

Hey I'm now also on substack.