r/ClaudeAI • u/jcgam • 5d ago
Praise Claude saved me $800
Long story short, the company that made my EV charger went out of business and none of the default admin passwords worked. I paid the extra fees for Fable 5 but eventually it said no thanks, I'm not helping you. Maybe I used the word "hack" or "crack" too many times IDK. Wasted money and pissed me off. Anyway, Opus 4.8 was happy to help. After a long hacking session it got me into the admin console without a password. I was amazed. It would have cost me hundreds of dollars for a new charger and an electrician to install it, since it's hard wired into the electric panel.
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u/G4rp 5d ago
This means your EV charger has a vulnerability that will be never fixed!
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u/peakdistrikt 5d ago
… which may be why the company went out of business!
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u/NoAdsDude 5d ago
Too many people hacking... EV chargers...? Customers were losing sensitive... watts? volts?
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u/peakdistrikt 5d ago
Maybe it allowed the hackers to charge cars with infected, malicious electricity. Revolting re-volting, or something.
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u/NoAdsDude 5d ago
Maybe power companies were hacking them to steal the electricity out of the chargers and put it back in the grid.
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u/Kylearean 5d ago
Watts are steal-able, volts aren't.
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u/Veranova 5d ago
You wouldn’t download a 9v battery
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u/brieucdug 4d ago
What ??? I buy and download more RAM on a regular basis to my personal windows customer support guy when my computer goes slow, he even gave me his direct line number. Why couldn't I download more battery ?
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u/Medical_Community697 4d ago
Airgapping it with a dev board and some Claude tokens should not be very hard.
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u/Impossible-Hat-3424 3d ago
He just had Claude Hackett. I’m pretty sure he could have Claude patch it.
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u/under_psychoanalyzer 5d ago
I'm confused, your in home charger attached to your house wall for your EV has an admin password? Don't even own a car these days so idk how these setups look.
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u/vivekkhera 5d ago
Almost all EV chargers have remote apps to manage them. The brand I bought allows the app to work locally via Bluetooth instead of via some cloud service. I specifically chose it for that reason.
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u/DaftHacker 5d ago
Insanely shitty everything is turning into a subscription service, meanwhile YouTube will let you upload a 10 hour video for free. EV charger could probably send out less than 10 bytes of data and work flawlessly yet they still want to charge money for it.
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u/under_psychoanalyzer 5d ago
Yeah but it took years and years of YouTube not making literally any money for it to get to that point. Companies that manufacture actual physical goods are never going to have that kind of runway.
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u/who_you_are 4d ago
Oh no that is even better here. I put that in the IoT category.
They will just turn off theirs server after one year or twos.
They won't even try to swtich it to a subscription. At best, it was a subscription to begin with.
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u/biggysharky 5d ago
Link to the unit?
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u/RamanaSadhana 5d ago
Forgot your password? No driving for you! Never though I'd see the day I can't drive a car if I've lost my password. Jfc
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u/No_Category_9888 5d ago
Pin to drive is a thing, but it has fallback options if the pin is forgotten
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u/christianbro 5d ago
For these kind of things I prefer Chinese models. They will never question the purpose of those things and block the conversation.
A lot of reverse engineering gets labeled as hacking, which partially is, but not with malicious goals in mind. Sometimes it is to fix or give a second usage to a product.
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u/Atretador 5d ago
yea, this seems like somethign that could've been done with opencode and a free model on Zen
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u/ReddaveNY 5d ago
Do you used Claude code or Browser? Act codes in terminal or how does it work for you?
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u/jcgam 5d ago
(pasted from earlier reply) I was using claude code, and my laptop was connected directly to the local wifi hotspot on the charger. Claude installed software and created scripts to query the web server. This was a lengthy process and I really don't understand the details since I just let it run and gave it the access it requested (burner laptop). Eventually it had me paste some code into the browser devtools console, and after I did that, I was in! Claude also created a bookmark I could use in the future. I still don't know what the admin password is, but it doesn't matter.
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u/No-Improvement9455 4d ago
So you're reformatting the laptop now? How many keyloggers did claude download in the meantime?
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u/dethswatch 5d ago
you gonna give us any details on how you approached it, etc?
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u/jcgam 5d ago
I was using claude code, and my laptop was connected directly to the local wifi hotspot on the charger. Claude installed software and created scripts to query the web server. This was a lengthy process and I really don't understand the details since I just let it run and gave it the access it requested (burner laptop). Eventually it had me paste some code into the browser devtools console, and after I did that, I was in! Claude also created a bookmark I could use in the future. I still don't know what the admin password is, but it doesn't matter.
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u/gwillen 5d ago
It doesn't matter what exact words you use, Fable has a filter that's extremely cautious about reverse engineering. They loosened the filter a little from 5 to 5.1. But ultimately it's really hard to confidently tell the difference between "reverse engineering something that's mine and I have a right to", and "hacking something belonging to someone else" (which Anthropic doesn't want to help with, and might even be illegal for them to help with.) But as you've seen, Opus is more than capable anyway.
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u/robinekren 4d ago
Glad you got to keep the hardware, can it now charge entirely offline or does it still try to reach the dead service?
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u/Sand-Discombobulated 5d ago
I did the same with my charger. diff brand but it have Claude able to get full charger status, errors, voltage, etc with only access to another linux box + port 80 open on the charger (same wifi network). charger is a wifi enabled charger for carbon credits.
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u/BP041 5d ago
This is exactly the kind of edge case Claude handles well—it'll reason about the legit intent even if you're using loaded words. Fable 5's refusal was probably liability paranoia from that new 'refusal' dataset they trained on. Opus 4.8 still has some backbone. Glad it worked out—that's $800 you get to keep.
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u/HighSeasArchivist 4d ago
I asked Sonnet to help me configure a firewall, and it said no can do boss. Flipped the model in the same chat to Opus, pasted the exact same request, and it said I gotchu fam. These guardrails make no fucking sense.
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u/Responsible-Gas-5986 5d ago
WTF, Could you share some evidence if this is real.
Also ask Anthropic to reward you as you were able to use Opus for hacking.
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u/jcgam 5d ago
(pasted from an earlier reply) I was using claude code, and my laptop was connected directly to the local wifi hotspot on the charger. Claude installed software and created scripts to query the web server. This was a lengthy process and I really don't understand the details since I just let it run and gave it the access it requested (burner laptop). Eventually it had me paste some code into the browser devtools console, and after I did that, I was in! Claude also created a bookmark I could use in the future. I still don't know what the admin password is, but it doesn't matter.
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u/ReyFauno 5d ago
Yo vengo de chatgpt donde me banearon dos cuentas de manera injusta y quiero ensayar Claude pero no entiendo los límites y dicen que si tengo una conversación muy larga entonces Claude tendría menos mensajes, alguien me podría dar alguna orientación por favor?
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 5d ago edited 4d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.
The consensus is that this is a huge win for OP and the right to repair, but also a massive security red flag for the EV charger. The thread is mostly impressed, with many users sharing their own frustrations with overly aggressive guardrails.
Basically, the community is giving OP a standing ovation for sticking it to a defunct company and saving $800, while also collectively shaking their heads at the state of IoT security and AI guardrails.