Pop Goes the Stack

A developer wanted to control his robot vacuum with a PS5 controller. With Claude Code’s help, he reverse-engineered the protocol, pulled an auth token, and unintentionally gained “root-level” control over roughly 7,000 vacuums across 24 countries, including access to live camera feeds, microphones, floor maps, and location data. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses talk with product leader Shaul Moav about why that happened, what it says about API security in an AI era, and why “guardrails” won’t save you if the pipe is broken.

Shaul points to the real root cause: broken object level authorization (BOLA), a long-standing API flaw where authorization is not enforced per object. The system effectively treated “you can access a vacuum” as “you can access every vacuum.” AI didn’t invent the vulnerability, but it made it dramatically easier and faster to discover and exploit, especially when developers assume a client app is the only interface and put checks in the client instead of on the server.

The discussion highlights AI's staggering blast radius. With APIs, the worst case is often data exposure. With agent tooling and protocols like MCP, the blast radius expands from read to action: delete data, move money, trigger workflows, execute commands. Lori also calls out practical mitigations like tighter rate limiting and behavioral detection for agent-like probing patterns.

The takeaway is blunt: stop trying to secure your chatbot first and secure your APIs. Treat agents like untrusted third parties, enforce object-level authorization everywhere, and assume any “internal-only” endpoint is mappable once AI is involved. As Shaul notes, faster shipping via AI-assisted coding can also mean more security findings if teams don’t deliberately optimize for correctness.