Andrew Macpherson

Intercom-nected Planetary, Planetary Intercom-nected

I wanted my apartment intercom to stop being annoying and let me remotely unlock my door.. A story of how a stock $20 LLM model owned the largest rental community in the United States.

Behind the wall panel of my intercom was a PoE Ethernet cable, a Linux-based monitor, and a " secure, encrypted IP communication for video door entry". Normally, gaining access means weeks of packet captures, protocol archaeology, broken Python, and pain. This time, I had a little robot sitting next to me that could read code, write glue, patch failures, chase tracebacks, and keep turning vague ideas into working tools while I watched the World Cup.

And damn was that robot good.

In one evening, my resident intercom became a camera/audio relay, management-plane foothold, root shell, full-device corpus, and map of a huge shared comms system fabric inside StuyTown, the largest rental community in the United States. The scary part was not opening my own door. The scary part was realizing the same primitives could plausibly ring intercoms at scale, hold call sessions open, interfere with camera availability, abuse resident-facing alert states, and degrade building entry workflows across a massive residential complex.... not to mention run Doom on every single users intercom.

This is not a talk about a magic exploit. It is a talk about what changes when the slow parts stop being slow. The hack is cool, but the real lesson is that the harnesses are quickly stopping being the moat. A mildly annoyed resident, a PoE adapter, and a $20 subscription were enough to make building-scale chaos feel reachable before the game was over.