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A miner TV
Thursday, October 12, 2017
Do you like to watch TV? If it’s an Android TV and you don’t have an anti-virus, you will probably want to familiarise yourself with a nice television trick criminals like to use to make money.
Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) devices are reported to have vulnerabilities that can be leveraged to gain remote unauthorised access to them. According to one of the authors of the research, German hacker Martin Herfurt of the company Nruns, the device’s browser can be directed to an arbitrary address or even used to run cryptocurrency mining code such as BitcoinPlus.
JavaScript code for mining bitcoin can be deployed on any page, so every site visitor who has the page opened in their browser will thus engage their system in mining.
Of course, conventional TVs are in no danger, but smart TVs and consoles can access the Internet. And where there is Internet, there are JavaScripts; and where there are JavaScripts, there is code that can be executed on the user end.
Our readers already know what makes scripts so hazardous is the fact they are invisible. A user doesn't know how many scripts were loaded when they visited a site and what they are doing now. This provides attackers with tremendous opportunities.
Are you, perhaps, inclined to think that TV security has improved since 2013? Well, you couldn’t be more wrong!
"About 90% of all the smart TVs sold in recent years are vulnerable to attacks of this kind", security researcher Rafael Scheel said while talking about the new technique enabling attackers to infect the devices remotely. Even the CIA, which developed its own espionage software for TVs, assumed that for it to work, their agent first had to gain physical access to a TV. But the new technique lets criminals do that remotely using a $50-$150 DVB-T transmitter.
The Anti-virus Times recommends
Malicious files feel at ease in locations no one expects them to be. So TVs are quite suitable for mining. There are lots of them, mining software operates quietly, and if it does interfere with the picture, users are most likely to blame their service provider for any inconvenience.
Unfortunately, operating systems for smart devices don't offer flexible configuration. That's why currently an anti-virus is the only means of protection.
If there is no way to install an anti-virus on your device, but it is accessible over SSH, use Dr.Web for Linux to scan your TV remotely.
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Неуёмный Обыватель
18:08:22 2018-07-24
vasvet
07:35:49 2018-07-24