Thursday, April 19, 2012

Security Vulnerability of Digital Television (DTV)

TV is a dominant equipment of every household in this planet. The newest trend in Television is Digital Television (DTV). With this change the television will be a hyper connected with internet. I have described about digital television in another post in detail. You can read that post here.
Its said that 100 million TVs will be connected to internet by 2016. This will open up a total new market and more other benefits. Other than that in the same time it will discover vast number of targets for hackers.
Internet connected TVs uses IP addresses (Internet Protocol) and they will be connected to internet almost every time the TV is on. So the network interfaces of these televisions will be always connected to internet.
Spoiler alerts says
"Our goal was to see if we could hack into the set-top box, steal customer personal information, pirate services, and incur denial-of-service conditions. Just for yucks, I added two more objectives: to see if we could steal porn (typically, one of the biggest revenue streams for cable companies) or force porn onto another television that was watching Disney content, with the idea that offended customers would drop their service."
So what we can do is avoiding internet connected television but prevent doing transactions over internet connected television and be more conscious about what we are watching. Obviously television producers will come up with security options to prevent these vulnerabilities yet hackers will always find a way.

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