Contriving

Reshared post from +Kaj Sotala

> A new attack that uses terrestrial radio signals to hack a wide range of Smart TVs raises an unsettling prospect—the ability of hackers to take complete control of a large number of sets at once without having physical access to any of them.

> The proof-of-concept exploit uses a low-cost transmitter to embed malicious commands into a rogue TV signal. That signal is then broadcast to nearby devices. It worked against two fully updated TV models made by Samsung. By exploiting two known security flaws in the Web browsers running in the background, the attack was able to gain highly privileged root access to the TVs. By revising the attack to target similar browser bugs found in other sets, the technique would likely work on a much wider range of TVs.

> "Once a hacker has control over the TV of an end user, he can harm the user in a variety of ways," Rafael Scheel, the security consultant who publicly demonstrated the attack, told Ars. "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." […]

> The exploit, which Scheel developed for Swiss security consulting company Oneconsult, was demonstrated in February at the European Broadcasting Union Media Cyber Security Seminar. Once completed, the attack gave Scheel the ability to remotely connect to the TV over the Internet using interfaces that allowed him to take complete control of the device. The infection was also able to survive both device reboots and factory resets. […]

> Scheel's approach […] can work against many TVs at once and eliminates the need for the attacker to physically control the device. Instead, the hacker need only turn on a transmitter that's within range of a large number of sets, say, in a densely populated apartment building or from a balcony that's near a TV of interest. The approach could also be modified in ways that give it greater reach. For instance, in the event a TV station or network was compromised—for example, a more extreme version of the 2015 hack that blacked out 11 channels belonging to French broadcaster TVMonde5—the attackers could surreptitiously embed malicious code into the signal being broadcast to millions of TVs. Embedding malicious commands into broadcasts from cable or satellite providers is also theoretically possible. A 2014 research paper written by Yossef Oren and Angelos D. Keromytis discussed embedding the exploits into various types of broadcasts.