Cybersecurity specialists of the American company IOActive have discovered that the famous humanoid robot Pepper is vulnerable to hooligan hacker attacks.
Scottish supermarket chain Margiotta recently acquired Pepper for its flagship store and trained it to interact with customers. The robot, named Fabio, was supposed to greet customers, communicate with them and help them find the goods they needed. In addition, a humanoid Pepper worth about 10 thousand dollars could shake hands with people, hug them and even joke on various topics.
It all looked cool in theory, but in reality something went wrong. The robot's advice turned out to be useless, and due to the background noise and voices, Pepper often misunderstood people. The store manager said shoppers shunned the strange creature because communication didn't always go smoothly. In addition, there were some problems with the movement of the robot - often it was physically unable to escort people to the goods they were looking for. As a result, Fabio was fired - he did not work for a week.
But the Americans from the IOActive company found the problem more serious - they found out that with the help of the Pepper malware it is possible to hack and gain remote control over the robot. For example, you can turn it off and restart it, load any images and videos on the screen, but most importantly, it allows hackers to demand a ransom from the owners of the hacked Pepper!
It is impossible to regain control of the robot on your own through a reboot or otherwise. The only option is to return the hapless Pepper to the manufacturer so that he can perform a factory reset, but this will take several weeks, and all this time will have to be sustained in one way or another. This is what attackers usually count on. About 10,000 robots have been sold worldwide, most of which work at Pizza Hut and Sprint.
Alexander Ponomarev