Researcher who found McDonald's free-food hack turns her attention to Chinese restaurant robots

A researcher caught the world’s leading supplier of commercial service robots using shoddy admin security that let attackers redirect the delivery machines to anywhere and make them follow any command.

Pudu Robotics is a Chinese robot manufacturer with over 100,000 units in over 1,000 cities doing everything from serving meals with the cat-like BellaBot, to using its mechanical-armed FlashBot to operate human-designed systems like elevators, as you can see below.

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According to analysts Frost and Sullivan, last year it captured 23 percent of the market for such kit, but a hacker has found that the backend software systems controlling them are vulnerable to abuse.

White-hat hacker Bobdahacker, who exposed the free-food flaw in McDonald's ordering system earlier this month, has been digging into Pudu and found she could exploit the control software behind the robots because administrators hadn’t locked down access. To do ...