Is Your TV a BADBOX?
The FBI says that BADBOX 2.0 is a malware campaign that has infected over a million home Internet-connected devices. Once infected it becomes part of hacker’s attack army.
It is commonly found in Chinese smart TVs (where most of them are made) and also on streaming boxes, projectors, tablets and even your smart dishwasher.
Even if these devices are not infected out of the factory, they can get infected from new malicious firmware updates or apps that you install that come mostly from third party download sites.
For most people, their TV is connected to the same home network as your work laptop, so depending on the malware loaded, your company PC is at risk as well.
What are some of the common uses the hackers rent out your TV for?
- Proxy network – this enabled the hackers to launch any kind of nastiness to other victims and when the FBI comes looking, they will come to your front door – assuming it isn’t nasty enough that they just kick the door down.
- Ad fraud – this one is financially attractive to the hackers. They just launch ads in the background from your TV and those of a million friends. This can generate ad revenue for the hacker.
- This is the nasty one. Stealing credentials that you enter and you know what a hacker can do with stolen credentials.
Germany thought the killed BADBOX 1.0 but less than a week later the malware was back on almost 200,000 devices. Now version 2.0 is even worse.
It seems for now that this is only infecting “off-brand” devices, but that is how BADBOX 1.0 started also. Right now the researchers say that they are seeing BADBOX 2.0 traffic in 222 countries, with the most in Brazil and the United States.
Again the good guys tried to take the network of hacked devices down and did disrupt over 500,000 devices ability to phone home, but the network is continuing to grow. See a list of KNOWN infected models at the link. That doesn’t mean other models are not infected, however. Credit: Bleeping Computer
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