(Yicai Global) Oct. 25 -- A team of Chinese hackers successfully fooled Amazon's facial recognition system into thinking a Chinese TV show host was US actor Arnold Schwarzenegger as part of a cyber security competition.

The group of six contestants called IYSWIM, an acronym of 'if you see what I mean,' has won this year's GeekPwn, Yicai Global's sister website, which carries stories in Chinese, reported yesterday. The team broke into Amazon's artificial intelligence system Rekognition in just 20 minutes. The theme of the year was AI and the control it may cast over the world.

IYSWIM was the only team which could finish all the assignments of manipulating AI systems to register a spacecraft as a stone, consider missiles as safe objects, and identify Jiang Changjian, TV show host of The Brain, as the earlier mentioned Austrian-American celebrity. Other five teams tried to attack the systems some 90 times without success. 

The secret to success was Google's FaceNet open source code. Wu Yuxi, a member of the IYSWIM team, said to Yicai Global that he had found the code online and used it to train for the competition. The post-90s born intellectual works for Facebook.

The contest revealed cracks in the security of using artificial intelligence in everyday life. Chinese tech giants Tencent Holdings, Ant Financial Services Group and JD.Com have all opened their unmanned stores this year, using sensors, facial recognition and mobile payments. US fast-food joint KFC also launched a special identification system last year in one restaurant in Hangzhou, which relies on users' grins to draw money from their mobile wallets.

Editor: Emmi Laine