Eavesdropping With a Smart TV

An anonymous reader writes "A article on The Register titled talks about a demo that was given in London last month by NCC Group where they turned a modern TV into an audio bug. 'The devices contain microphones and cameras that can be utilized by applications — Skype and similar apps being good examples. The TV has a fairly large amount of storage, so would be able to hold more than 30 seconds of audio – we only captured short snippets for demonstrations purposes. A more sophisticated attack could store more audio locally and only upload it at certain times, or could even stream it directly to a server, bypassing the need to use any of the device’s storage.' Given the Snowden revelations and what we've seen previously about older tech being deprecated, how can we protect ourselves with the modern devices (other than not connecting them to the Internet)?"

Comments

Re:Don't connect them to the Internet

[ShieldW0lf]

That won't work.

There's a good breakdown on infowars about why it won't work:

http://www.infowars.com/91497/

But you can't just take what's on infowars without a grain of salt, so here's a video on intel's website where they substantiate everything, but with a positive spin

http://www.intel.com/content/w...

We need open hardware. The hardware being made in the factories is not trustworthy.

For the majority who won't click links and read articles, the gist is, there's a 3G radio antenna and a special dedicated processor inside of your CPU, and it can be used to either take complete control of your device, or to destroy it. All the details are there in Intel's marketing material.