patrick.net

https://consumerist.com/2017/01/06/ransomware-spreading-onto-smart-tvs-is-a-pain-to-fix/

Back in 2015, one Symantec employee described how quickly he was able to find a brand-new TV filled up with ransomware. That TV, he explained, came with a preinstalled gaming portal, where you can select and install games.

But that connection wasn't encrypted, meaning basically any man-in-the-middle type attacker can hope into the request and redirect the user to install malicious software instead. The TV the Symantec employee was testing with was running Android-based software, and so Android-based ransomware worked, displaying a ransom note on the screen and rendering the set unusable.

In recent weeks, we've seen a real-world case of exactly that. One software developer, Darren Cauthon, shared the story on Twitter.

It began, Cauthon said, when a member of his family downloaded an app for watching movies on the family's LG smart TV. Shortly thereafter, the TV rebooted — and was being held ransom for $500.

Since 2015, LG has used a different operating system for its devices, called WebOS. But at the time Cauthon's family got their TV, LG was still using Android-based software. And so their TV was rendered useless by a variant on common Android malware that first started being seen on phones in 2015.

But there was another catch: LG doesn't publicly share the steps to factory resetting its devices. So Cauthon contacted LG for support and was told that he could bring it to a service center where, for $340, an employee would run a factory reset.

As you can currently buy a brand-name 40″ HD smart TV for less than $400 online, that did not strike him as a particularly good deal. So he eventually talked LG into sharing the process for booting the TV into recovery mode with him — which he then uploaded to YouTube for others to follow.

Cauthon's story, then, ended well. But his family, as PC World notes, was lucky: as a software engineer, Cauthon was comfortable with messing around in the virtual guts of his Android-powered TV in order to repair it (once he knew how to get there). And the malware that infected the TV only locked the screen and prevented functions from being accessed.

But unfortunately, he's not alone. While Cauthon's tale of woe seems to be the first known case of TV-bricking ransomware in the U.S., such attacks are on the rise elsewhere. As Infosecurity Magazine reports, Japanese consumers are being particularly hard hit. In 2016, Japan saw a “spike” in ransomware attacks on TVs, the magazine reports. Over 300 TV-based attacks were reported in that nation over the course of the year — and the more people that get hit, the higher a chance that some of them will pay up because they don't see any other choice.

#TV #ransomware #crime