Amazon security engineer hacks PC accessories with Claude Opus to make them work better — Asus, Insta360 and Elgato products reverse engineered in hours for 'better control', but engineer admits this also 'scares me'

A security engineer at Amazon hacked a bunch of peripherals using AI Claude Opus did most of the legwork in applying modified firmware to a webcam, microphone and more The relative ease with which AI allows this kind of modification points to a worrying future of peripherals being compromised on a grander scale In another example of how AI could prove to be a threat to our devices, an Amazon security engineer has demonstrated how powerful Claude Opus is when it comes to reverse engineering PC peripherals.

Chaz Schlarp, who's a Senior Security Engineer at Amazon, wrote a blog post about experiments he conducted with a bunch of peripherals such as a webcam and a microphone.

He wanted to find out how easy it was to modify the firmware and pull off some useful tricks with these devices using AI, but clearly there's a darker side here — namely that the same access could be leveraged by a malicious actor to compromise your system via these gadgets.

Schlarp used Claude Opus 5 to mess around with the firmware for an Insta360 webcam , a Shure microphone, an Asus monitor, an Elgato video capture stick, and an Elgato mini-light (a compact device for lighting your streaming videos).

Schlarp explains: "My process was pretty much the same for each of these devices: grab a copy of the device's firmware and associated update tool from the manufacturer, throw it into my reverse engineering environment, tell Claude Opus 5 what my goals are, and let it churn." One thing that became quite clear to the security engineer was that these devices lacked any decent firmware integrity protection to prevent modifying and applying a new firmware.

Only the Elgato light had any defenses in this respect, and they were easy enough to circumvent.

Schlarp explains a trick with his Asus ROG Swift PG42UQ monitor to demonstrate the kind of useful utility that can be on offer with this kind of firmware modding.

He found it was possible to remove an annoying pop-up warning that periodically tells the owner to run the 'pixel cleaning' process (although the engineer hasn't implemented the fix in the firmware yet).

He also discovered a way to get DisplayWidget (a Windows utility) features running on his Linux system, with a shell script that can flick through certain bits of functionality like the hardware crosshair or FPS counter (which could be set up on hotkeys).

Most of what he did, though, was about proving how relatively easy it was to subvert the firmware using AI to do the heavy lifting, and, for example, disable the webcam's recording light (in the style of surveillance malware, so the user wouldn't know if the camera was secretly recording).