Spoiler alert: Your TV will be hacked

April 19, 2012 | Source: InfoWorld

(Credit: stock image)

Last week you may have read a headline that blared “100 million TVs will be Web-connected by 2016.” So will Internet TVs will be hacked as successfully as previous generations of digital devices?

“Of course they will,” says security advisor Roger Grimes, who has successfully hacked Internet-connected TVs. “Nothing in a computer built into a TV makes it less attackable than a PC. Internet-connected TVs have IP addresses, always-on network interfaces, CPUs, storage, memory, and operating systems — the details that have offered hackers a bounty of attack choices for the last three decades.

“Can we make Internet TVs more secure than regular computers? Yes. Will we? Probably not. We never do the right things proactively. Instead, we as a global society appear inclined to accept half-baked security solutions that are more like Band-Aids than real protection.

“The future of Web-connected TV is going to be just like today’s world. We’ll have global malware takeovers, constant patching of our TVs, DoS attacks, and all the other ugly stuff that comes with our always-connected world. In my line of work, job security is guaranteed.”