A Chinese technology company’s cloud infrastructure briefly exposed live camera feeds, microphones, and detailed floor plans from inside thousands of homes around the world.
A security vulnerability tied to DJI’s $2,000 Romo robot vacuum reportedly allowed a single device credential to surface access to nearly 7,000 machines operating in 24 countries. These are not simple appliances. They are internet-connected sensors mapping bedrooms, kitchens, hallways, and living rooms in real time.
Rather than just verifying a single token, the servers granted access for a small army of robots, essentially treating him as their respective owner. That slip-up meant Azdoufal could tap into their real-time camera feeds and activate their microphones. He also claims he could compile 2D floor plans of the homes the robots were operating in.
During a live demonstration, thousands of devices reportedly began reporting in within minutes. Serial numbers appeared. Floor plans rendered. Locations surfaced across continents.
"Roughly 7,000 of them, all around the world, began treating Azdoufal like their boss. He could remotely control them, and look and listen through their live camera feeds. I watched each of these robots slowly pop into existence on a map of the world."
DJI says it deployed automatic patches on February 8 and February 10 and that no user action was required. The company described the flaw as a backend permission-validation issue discovered in late January.
DJI identified a vulnerability affecting DJI Home through internal review in late January and initiated remediation immediately. The issue was addressed through two updates, with an initial patch deployed on February 8 and a follow-up update completed on February 10. The fix was deployed automatically, and no user action is required.
That may close one vulnerability. It does not eliminate the architecture that made it possible.
DJI equipment has already been restricted in certain federal environments amid data security concerns tied to its drone technology. For years, lawmakers have warned about foreign-connected hardware embedded in American infrastructure and the risks associated with data routed through overseas or foreign-controlled cloud systems. Chinese technology firms operate under a different legal and regulatory regime than U.S. companies, a fact that has fueled bipartisan scrutiny in Congress.
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Now the same brand is operating inside private residences. A Chinese firm’s cloud-based architecture was mapping and transmitting interior layouts from inside American homes. The idea that interior blueprint data from American households could be concentrated inside foreign-operated cloud systems is precisely what has driven Washington’s long-running debate over Chinese tech.
Once you’re an authenticated client on the MQTT broker, if there are no proper topic-level access controls, you can subscribe to wildcard topics and see all messages from all devices in plaintext at the application layer. TLS does nothing to prevent this.
In plain terms, centralized cloud systems create centralized risk. Encryption in transit does not prevent overly broad permissions from exposing sensitive information once it is inside the system. If interior mapping data and live feeds are aggregated behind a single validation layer, the scale of exposure expands instantly when that layer fails.
There is no evidence of malicious exploitation in this instance. But the vulnerability illustrates how quickly visibility can scale when cloud permissions fail.
Interior mapping data is not just cleaning telemetry. It is a digital blueprint of private living spaces. When that blueprint is stored, validated, and routed through foreign-operated cloud infrastructure governed by a different legal system, the implications extend beyond consumer privacy and into questions of oversight, accountability, and national control.
Seven thousand homes across two dozen countries were briefly held up by a flawed validation system. In an era of rising scrutiny over Chinese technology operating inside critical systems, this episode will not calm skeptics who worry about data concentration and foreign visibility. When the architecture of the modern American home runs through distant cloud servers controlled by companies already under national security review, privacy stops being a feature setting. It becomes a sovereignty question.
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