When I say hacking has gone to another level, I mean everything can be possibly hacked.
Imagine!, hackers can now use broadcast signals to hack and gain remote access to your smart TV, spy on you with its camera and microphone.
Different hacking techniques which is becoming alarming in the Western World is apparently far beyond what we have seen in developing countries like ours.
An experiment was carried out by a hacker recently, and this experiment simply shows that some of the smart TVs sold out in Europe are prone to be easily hacked.
The said hacker, who carried out this experiment used two Samsung Smart TVs, of which he remotely had access to the TVs.
The implication of this experiment is that a hacker can quickly access many smart TVs within a few seconds without necessarily tampering the physicality of any of such Smart TV.
“This type of attack would allow hackers to access other devices in the home network and spy on people with the TV’s camera and microphone, the hacker said.
The available report indicates that a Security Consultant, Rafael Scheel devised the hacking technique using a transmitter called Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial (DVB-T) signal to embed the malicious commands into smart TVs.
The hacking technique gave Scheel the total manipulation over the smart TVs, as well as its camera and microphone.
According to Dr. Yossi Oren, a Cyber Security expert at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, he said, this research is significant because TVs are used by a fundamentally different demographic than computers.
Meanwhile, there are malware that hits your device and you will not be able to get rid of it, even if you do restore factory reset. The case is not different here, the hack developed by Scheel will survive device reboots and factory resets.
“The hack could be used on a broad range of smart TV models, with the signal hardware he attacked installed in about 90 percent of all TVs sold in Europe last year,” Scheel said during his experiment, at a Security Conference in Switzerland.
In an interview with Ars Technica, Scheel said, once a hacker has control over the TV of an end user, such hacker can harm the user in a variety of ways.
‘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.’
How does this affect Nigeria?
If by chance Nigerians stations get direct broadcasting signals from Europe, mainly the UK, there are possibilities of our smart TVs being hacked.
This is because many TVs in Europe, including most sold in the United Kingdom, are tuned to these signals, and they contain a vulnerability that makes them easy to hack, according to reports.
For the fact that Scheel used a single transmitting signal his technique could attack several smart TVs at once remotely.
Is there a solution to this?
A simple update from manufacturers of smart TV can go a long way by blocking the attack. But the problem is that smart TV companies often take a long time to send out updates.
‘People who use TVs don’t know/care about security, they are not used to getting security prompts from their TVs, they don’t have the discipline of installing security updates, and so on,’ says Dr. Yossi.
In conclusion, just stay tuned to some of the hacking updates and be security minded.
