Spoiler Alert: Your TV Will Be Hacked

snydeq writes "With rising popularity of Internet-enabled TVs, the usual array of attacks and exploits will soon be coming to a screen near you. 'Will Internet TVs will be hacked as successfully as previous generations of digital devices? Of course they will. Nothing in a computer built into a TV makes it less attackable than a PC. ... Can we make Internet TVs more secure than regular computers? Yes. Will we? Probably not. We never do the right things proactively. Instead, we as a global society appear inclined to accept half-baked security solutions that are more like Band-Aids than real protection.'"

Comments

Why not yet ?

[nonos]

I'm wondering why my tv hasn't been hacked with air waves : one morning, I switched it on and it told me a firmware update had been uploaded over the air during the night.

What can stop hackers to send rogue fw updates over the air ?

Also, is it possible to exploit mpeg2 video decoder bugs to takecontrol of tv ?

Any info of previously discovered hacks of this kind ?

Re:Heh

[AmiMoJo]

I recently got a Panasonic smart TV. There is an Android app that lets you control it from your phone/tablet, and you can push photos and video directly from the device onto the TV screen. It works over wifi and there isn't any kind of authentication or code. In other words if your neighbours have insecure wifi and a Panasonic TV you and display whatever you like on their screen.

I'm sure many other smart TV platforms are similarly insecure, in that they assume your wifi network is a secure environment.