[coolcat4843]

With "smart hdtv's" on the market, with ethernet connections, is there any chance that your tv

or blu-ray player for that matter, could become infected with viruses?


Anybody have any problems?

 

[Ratman]

Well... if has an IP address and access to an external network, anything's possible.

 

[Otto Pylot]

...... or maybe if you try to play and infected file from an external source like a USB flashdrive.

 

[MrBobb]

Possible but low probability.


A virus wants to infect as many machines as possible. A TV/BR player is just too narrow a target.


Cellphones is been around longer and got much larger coverage yet I haven't hear any significant amount of infestation in this area.

 

[Phase700B]

Malware is not much of an issue. More likely are data errors or file corruption resulting in very long upgrade times or possible bricking of the player. Very rare though.

 

[olyteddy]



Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBobb /forum/post/20820628


Possible but low probability.


A virus wants to infect as many machines as possible. A TV/BR player is just too narrow a target.


Cellphones is been around longer and got much larger coverage yet I haven't hear any significant amount of infestation in this area.

Then Google 'iPhone hacked'...

 

[gregzoll]



Quote:
Originally Posted by olyteddy /forum/post/20821472


Then Google 'iPhone hacked'...

Yes, it is called Jailbreaking. As for the original question, yes there is a possibility of something being hacked, but what would be the reason that someone would try to hack a blu-ray or smart tv, other than try to use it to figure out your viewing habits, or brick it into being a boat anchor. It does not have enough ram space to be used for ddos, due to today's script kiddies would not know how to do it, compared to those who wrote machine code in asm back in the day.

 

[Extreme_Boky]

Malware would need to be stored somewhere first. This is in fact possible ... on TV's and bluray / DVD players that can cache an Internet content.

However, malware would need to alter the code....to do real harm. There's the firmware that can be flashed. The firmware file size is rigorously checked first for the correct size AND bit sequence. I suppose if someone is bored enough, then YES, the malware could flash the firmware chip and render the TV inoperable (or make it do silly things!... I can see how this could actually be quite interesting and challenging)

There are other codes that operate certain functions inside the TV - these codes are PERMANENTLY burnt on certain chips so malware can not do any harm here for example, the T-CON processor knows which memory area to use to store the incoming frame, knows how to deal with next consecutive frame and how to compare the two, and knows how to generate / interpolate the intermediate in-between frame to smooth the motion. These sets of commands are permanently burnt and can not be corrupted by malware.

I can't really see the incentive in writing the firmware that would make TV unusable but you never know

Boky