Smart TV Hack Uses Broadcast Signal To Hijack Your Device

Smart TVs are great as it does much more than conventional TVs, but unfortunately security on smart TVs are admittedly lacking which means that if companies aren’t paying attention, they’re basically selling devices that are open to hackers. In fact recently Oneconsult security researcher Rafael Scheel revealed to ArsTechnica a potential attack.

What makes this attack so “deadly” is the fact that it is simple, remote, scalable, and relatively inexpensive. This is because it uses a low-cost transmitter to embed malicious code into your TV’s broadcast signal. So far it seems that two fully updated smart TV models from Samsung were successfully hacked in the test demonstrated by Scheel. According to Scheel, making some slight changes to target similar bugs found in the browsers of smart TVs should allow the hack to work on other models as well.

Scheel said, “Once a hacker has control over the TV of an end user, he can harm the user in a variety of ways. Among many others, the TV could be used to attack further devices in the home network or to spy on the user with the TV’s camera and microphone.” Now the good news is that because the hack requires the use of DVB-T signals, it won’t work anywhere as only some countries use it.

For those living in the US, you guys are safe (from this particular hack) as North America uses ATSC broadcasts, but basically it does serve to highlight the importance of not neglecting the security of our connected devices.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Hack, Security