{"id":12896,"date":"2018-03-26T09:00:29","date_gmt":"2018-03-26T03:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.in\/blog\/?p=12896"},"modified":"2019-11-22T15:31:36","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T10:01:36","slug":"hacking-robots-sas2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.in\/blog\/hacking-robots-sas2018\/12896\/","title":{"rendered":"A robot’s ransom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like most electronic stuff, robots are not immune to cybercriminals. Last year, researchers at IOActive detected as many as 50 vulnerabilities in robots developed by the Japanese firm SoftBank. They informed the manufacturer but never heard back. So this year at the Security Analyst Summit 2018<\/a>, they decided to demonstrate what can happen if a robot gets hacked.<\/p>\n

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Hackable robots<\/h2>\n

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Robots are all around us, toiling away in factories and warehouses<\/a>, busting a gut in landfills<\/a>, and even working in hospitals<\/a>. For its part, SoftBank Robotics supplies electronic helpers to work with people. The NAO<\/a> model introduces school kids and students to programming and robotics, and it also teaches children with autism. Another model, Pepper<\/a>, was created to work in the service sector \u2014 its tasks include attracting potential customers and consulting with buyers.<\/p>\n

As the IOActive team discovered, to seize control of NAO you only need to be on the same network as the robot. The experts found vulnerabilities allowing commands to be remotely executed on it, effectively giving over full control of its actions.<\/p>\n

To demonstrate how these vulnerabilities can be exploited, the team forced NAO to demand<\/a> bitcoins from its human interlocutor; but real criminals would be limited only by their imagination and programming skills. What\u2019s more, it\u2019s not just NAO that can be infected with ransomware; the more business-oriented Pepper is just as vulnerable, and other models probably are as well.<\/p>\n