French programmer says accidentally hacked 7,000 robot vacuums

The French tech worker, based in Barcelona, told AFP on a phone call this week that he had tried to customise his flashy DJI Romo vacuum cleaner out of curiosity. — Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash

TOKYO: All he wanted was to move his robot vacuum cleaner around with a PlayStation controller. But programmer Sammy Azdoufal claims he unwittingly gained remote access to 7,000 other devices.

His experience has drawn attention to the potential security risks of smart home gadgets, with Chinese manufacturer DJI saying it had fixed a "vulnerability" detected in its software.