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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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @08:40PM
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
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
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
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.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.