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posted by on Wednesday January 04 2017, @08:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-control-the-horizontal,-we-control-the-vertical dept.

It took a year from proof of concept to in-the-wild attack, but ransomware for Android-based smart TVs is now here. As one victim discovered this Christmas, figuring out how to clean such an infection can be quite difficult.

Ransomware for Android phones has already been around for several years and security experts have warned in the past that it's only a matter of time until such malicious programs start affecting smart TVs, especially since some of them also run Android.

[...] Kansas-based software developer Darren Cauthon reported on Twitter on Dec. 25 that a family member accidentally infected his Android-based TV with ransomware after downloading a movie-watching app. The picture shared by Cauthon showed the TV screen with an FBI-themed ransom message.

[...] Eventually LG provided Cauthon with a solution that involved pressing and releasing two physical buttons on the TV in a particular order. This booted the TV, which runs the now defunct Android-based Google TV platform, into a recovery mode.

The Register also has additional details on the recovery method:

With the TV powered off, place one finger on the settings symbol then another finger on the channel down symbol. Remove finger from settings, then from channel down, and navigate using volume keys to the wipe data/ factory reset option. ®

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Wednesday January 04 2017, @08:23PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 04 2017, @08:23PM (#449504) Journal

    Remember when TVs were simple?

    And light bulbs and toasters too.

    Computers had plain ASCII. No GUI.

    You had to memorize a stack of manuals -- that couldn't be removed from the computer room because they were bolted to a large table.

    And it was uphill both ways.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @08:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @08:40PM (#449511)

    Remember when "simple" computers had complicated keyboard combinations? Remember Apple-Option-P-R to reset the PRAM? What the hell is a PRAM, how am I supposed to know to hold down four keys to reset the PRAM, and how the hell am I supposed to reach all four keys in the first place? And that was on the classic Macintosh, the computer "for the rest of us" and the only computer in history that never had a command line. The "rest of us" was who exactly? Particularly lazy geeks who couldn't memorize all those commands to work a command line? There was no way "us" ordinary folk would figure out how to hold down Apple-Option-P-R. You still needed to be a geek to do that.

    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:37PM

      by sjames (2882) on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:37PM (#449539) Journal

      Double bucky, you're the one!
      You make my keyboard lots of fun.
      Double bucky, an additional bit or two:
      (Vo-vo-de-o!)
      Control and meta, side by side,
      Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!
      Double bucky! Half a thousand glyphs, plus a few!
      Oh,
      I sure wish that I
      Had a couple of
      Bits more!
      Perhaps a
      Set of pedals to
      Make the number of
      Bits four:
      Double double bucky!
      Double bucky, left and right
      OR'd together, outta sight!
      Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of
      Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of
      Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you!
      - The Great Quux

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @10:05PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @10:05PM (#449554)

        Yeah, that's right, shithead. Sidestep the issue of a secret reset sequence, and copypaste a obsolete joke about the number of keys on a space cadet keyboard. Do you know why your moronic fucking joke is obsolete?

        A modern keyboard has more keys than a space cadet keyboard.

        100 Key Space Cadet [wikimedia.org]

        104 Key Standard Keyboard [wikimedia.org]

        Kill yourself now, you motherfucking cunt.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 05 2017, @02:11PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 05 2017, @02:11PM (#449774) Journal

      I had forgotten about resetting the PRAM. It was something that shouldn't commonly need to be done.

      The PRAM was nonvolatile memory that held some settings across power cycles. Powered by tiny battery like the real time clock.

      One setting that it held was which bootable drive to boot from first before trying bootable drives in order. This would only be set if:
      1. You had multiple *bootable* drives attached
      2. The one you wanted to boot from was not first in the order that the Mac would normally test for bootable
      3. You used the control panel to designate which specific drive to attempt to boot from first

      Then you would reset the PRAM if . . .
      4. You later changed your drives around
      5. The drive designated to boot from can begin to partially boot, but is unable to actually complete the boot and / or has obsolete OS software

      But I could be mis-remembering.

      As for being a machine without a command line, you could get MPW, at first by purchasing it, later for free. MPW is Macintosh Programmer's Workshop. It had all the command line goodness you could want. Way more powerful than DOS. Designed by some guys who were unix hacks, so it had a lot of goodness with piping, command backquoting, etc even though there wasn't multi processing in the unix sense. And the command line was done within GUI editor windows. Select the text you want to execute and CMD-ENTER. Or put the cursor at the end of a line of a command and CTRL-ENTER. And the scripts you could write were far and away above anything PC's and their MS-DOS had to offer.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @08:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @08:44PM (#449516)

    member having to replace tubes in your tv because the thing burned out again. member having to have two strong men to carry it around? good times good times

    • (Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @08:56PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @08:56PM (#449523)
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:12AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:12AM (#449708)

        Mike Pence, is that you?

      • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday January 05 2017, @11:08AM

        by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Thursday January 05 2017, @11:08AM (#449732) Journal

        That's legal in Alaska.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:47PM (#449545)

      I remember having to have a TV repairman having to manually adjust the deflection coils and hold settings using a mirror.

    • (Score: 1) by gmrath on Thursday January 05 2017, @03:10AM

      by gmrath (4181) on Thursday January 05 2017, @03:10AM (#449624)

      I remember Dad in the back of one of those tube TVs when it crapped out with a screw driver, shorting out this and that, resulting in loud, satisfying cracks. When all was safe, we removed the tubes, packed them in a cigar box, and headed to the nearest drug store to test them on the tube tester. I remember tubes named 12AU6 and like mixes of numbers and letters; only later did I learn they specified tube type, power supply voltages and other properties, all rolled up in those codes. We usually got the TV going again after replacing the failed tube(s), sometimes after two or more trips to the drug store tube tester. I also remember rare occasions when not everything was shorted to ground long enough to bleed off the charge. Dad was not a profane man, almost never swearing, but I learned a new word or two when he discovered a charged cap the hard way. I'm sure Dad didn't think of TV repairs after coming home from work as "good times" but, as a 10-year-old, I was fascinated by that kind of stuff, and I did. Now, to repair TVs and the like it's cheaper to just pitch it and buy a new one.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:05PM

    by GungnirSniper (1671) on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:05PM (#449528) Journal

    Maybe I'm in the get-off-my-lawn club now, but I'd rather have my display just be that - a display. I don't want or need any complexity added to it. It should do what it is designed to do, which is display content sent over from elsewhere.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:25PM (#449535)

      yeah and I wish they kept making affordable 16:10 screens.

      But no, the non-geek laypeople wanted cheap 1366x768 laptop screens that could play DVDs.

      It is SO hard to find a good laptop with a 16:10 screen -- I have a 17" screen laptop that is ten years old with a 1680x1050 that I will never give up, and I desperately wish I bought the 1920x1200 model back then... but it was a $2500 laptop new. Now it is only worth a few hundred bucks, if because other people give it additional value because of the nice screen...

      It is hard to find a good desktop monitor of similar resolutions, but I gave up on that quest and just opted for 2560x1440 and the "4k" resolutions now. Getting beyond 1920x1200 is a suitable option, if I can't get 16:10 I can at least scale the resolution beyond it and pretend. I will never go under 1920:1200 unless its for 1680x1050 or 1280x1024... there are minimum standards to keep to retain one's dignity, you know?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:48PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:48PM (#449547)

        For laptops this site has a decent filter

        http://www.xoticpc.com/custom-gaming-laptops-notebooks-gaming-laptops-ct-118-96-98.html#!/dir=asc&no_cache=true&order=price&size=13&screentyperes=163-95-96&p=clear [xoticpc.com]

        High res is going to cost you though on a laptop.

        4k Monitors and TVs prices are crashing. I would probably hold on that until mid august to see where things settle out. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100160979%20600338147%20600560547%20600554975 [newegg.com]

        Another option is DIY. If you get a Dell or HP or Lenovo you can *sometimes* swap the panel. I know for the HP I have I can get a better panel. Just means completely disassembling the thing. Which for some laptops is not always a simple task. It is just a mater of finding the right part number. Usually listed in a pdf on the manufactures site on how to fix them.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @10:45PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @10:45PM (#449575)

          Thanks for the laptop link-- and as to the options you mentioend, I am pursing exactly that. It's an HP that I have, and I recently purchased a new CPU and new video module. There is a 1920x1200 screen available for it, but when I last looked the prices exceeded that of a new laptop. I didn't look recently but I probably should (as long as I am going to open it up and do surgery to replace the CPU and GPU).

          The "new" CPU was $25 and the video module was $40; this will let me have the highest end CPU in the laptop model line and a faster GPU than was officially available for it. The GPU is compatible via still having the same socket type and bios whitelisting due to the vendor ID being the same, apparently -- other modules that may fit may not be whitelisted (BIOS whitelisting is horrible).

          I am hoping to swap the panel some day; at least when I do I'll have a video module that can drive it (provided that it doesn't arrive SMASHED like that last China epacket delivery I had... so much for saving money by bypassing the stateside reseller on ebay..)

          As to the 4K monitor prices, yes I just bought a viewsonic that is working out very well for me. I had previously had a 2560x1440 "shimian" South Korean monitor; the 4k was about $500 give or take $50 and shipping; the Shimian when new was a 0 dead pixel variety for $380 or so.

          The prices for 4K are in some cases cheaper than an excellent quality 1920x1200. Perhaps I am just nostalgic; however there is no denying the productivity one can get out of having a big screen. Laptops with less than 1680:1050 just seem like toys. I can't imagine how anyone can push spreadsheets and read emails on a 1366x768 screen on anything beyond Windows 7 -- the defaults over the past 3 or 4 years have been to take up more space and be much less informationally dense. Really going backwards and the greater resolutions are proving to provide the same screen real estate that I had back on XP. I've never even had a 1920x1080 monitor; I can't compare that with anything I have but I imagine it is only marginally better than 1680x1050.

          When most of your job is reading... getting DVD playback optimization sized screens for devices that don't even come with a DVD player anymore is not the ideal outcome.

      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday January 05 2017, @01:35PM

        by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday January 05 2017, @01:35PM (#449764) Homepage
        No resolution higher than 720 × 576 is needed for watching DVDs.

        Remember 800x600 at 24bpp on your SVGA video card from the early 1990s? That was high enough resolution/colour-depth.
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:54PM (#449550)

      Try looking for "commercial" displays, as they usually have a lot of those smart features disabled. The problem with them is you have to be a little more careful as not all have tuners, not all have speakers, there may be less inputs (or one of each) and a few other caveats. Depending on your needs, you may also be able to get away with a monitor with your set-top box and surround sound system doing the heavy lifting.

    • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 04 2017, @10:32PM

      by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Wednesday January 04 2017, @10:32PM (#449568) Homepage Journal

      Indeed, a TV should be a TV. Buying hackable televisions and light bulbs is just stupid.

      Sometimes new is better, sometimes worse. I miss having a thermostat in my house that didn't need a battery. I miss potentiometers in car radios (digital knobs suck after a decade's use, pots just need switch oil). I don't miss car's points or carburetor. It depends on the tech.

      I fear I may soon be missing a dumb TV.

      --
      mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
      • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:25PM

        by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:25PM (#449943)

        I don't miss car's points or carburetor.

        I do. I could fix things myself back then, and somewhat enjoy the attempt. Now, if I even have the slightest clue about what to do under the hood of a car, so much stuff is crammed in there I can't reach it anyway.

        • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 06 2017, @04:57PM

          by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Friday January 06 2017, @04:57PM (#450291) Homepage Journal

          I don't miss points because the damned clips that held the distributor down always cut the hell out of my fingers. I don't miss carbs because I don't miss 19 mpg on the highway driving a 4 cylinder.

          And I never like working on cars, anyway. Only did it because I couldn't afford to hire somebody.

          --
          mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by digitalaudiorock on Thursday January 05 2017, @12:53AM

      by digitalaudiorock (688) on Thursday January 05 2017, @12:53AM (#449602) Journal

      +1000. A TV should be just a dumb monitor to which you connect whatever smart stuff you want...if for no other reason than the fact that a good TV will outlast the technology by a decade, I'm still using a 1080i Hitachi rear projection TV that looks as beautiful as it did when I bought it 13 years ago. Now it's connected to a MythTV system running a 4.4 Linux kernel actually. At best all that "smart" crap will be obsolete is a year or two...at worst it'll be vulnerable to who knows what with no updates available. No thanks. I'm frankly concerned that cars are going the same horrible route. I was actually happy last year to get a 2005 Scion Xb with almost no mileage, and almost no technology to speak of.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @09:36PM (#449538)

    And it was uphill both ways.

    It was uphill both ways because we had a raised floor to accommodate the AC requirements.

  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:10AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:10AM (#449706) Journal

    Those LED filament bulbs are a bit less complex than their predecessors.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_filament [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 2) by VanessaE on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:57AM

    by VanessaE (3396) <vanessa.e.dannenberg@gmail.com> on Thursday January 05 2017, @09:57AM (#449715) Journal

    "And it was uphill both ways."

    You forgot "in the CGA snow!"