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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday June 20 2019, @12:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the at-least-the-TVs-are-smart dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Samsung asks users to please virus-scan their TVs

Yesterday on Twitter, Samsung's US support team reminded everyone to regularly—and manually—virus-scan their televisions.

Samsung's team followed this up with a short video showing someone in a conference room going 16 button-presses deep into the system menu of a Samsung QLED TV to activate the television's built-in virus-scan, which is apparently "McAfee Security for TV."

Unsurprisingly, Samsung got immediate pushback on these tweets and almost as immediately deleted them.

This may raise some questions about Samsung's practices and what we as consumers should be expecting of modern devices. The fact that Samsung's malware scanner is McAfee (and that McAfee's only customer for the service is apparently Samsung) raises questions about the real value and intent of the service: is Samsung paying McAfee for what has to be a pretty trivial application, or is McAfee paying Samsung for brand promotion? But even if we skip the brand-related cynicism and take the concept at face value, we are left with a few questions.

Ars reached out to Samsung with the questions below, but the below statement the company provided didn't answer them. The following statement is attributed to Samsung:

Samsung takes security very seriously and our products and services are designed with security in mind. We recently shared information about one of the preventative security features on our Smart TVs, in order to show consumers proactive steps they can take on their device. We want to clarify that this was simply a way to educate consumers about one of the features included in our products and was only posted because we believed that consumers would find it informative.

[...] The best way to keep your big, expensive smart TV safe is never to allow it access to your network in the first place. The consumer electronics space is packed chock-full with inexpensive, high-quality streaming devices that typically have better interfaces and more options than most smart televisions anyway. Roku and Amazon 4K-streaming players both start at less than $50; in the unlikely event one of those becomes compromised, "recycle the bad one and buy a new one, probably from a competing brand" seems like a perfectly reasonable response.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Hyperturtle on Thursday June 20 2019, @04:10PM (2 children)

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Thursday June 20 2019, @04:10PM (#858007)

    I'd uh try to figure out what it is doing. It sounds like you don't know, and it's likely that if it was listening to you all of the time, you'd never know. Unless you checked.

    I would guess it does more than calling home now and then. Often, smart tvs connect to a few different places. When they try to upload personal data to 3rd party vendors, that is not home, and you would not receive an error message. They try not to draw attention to that sort of thing...

    But, you might want to let it call home. For all we know there is an update that makes the TV more secure. Sony TVs were pretty cool recently in that they started to play advertisements from Google. Features everyone loves--unskippable ads! https://www.the-ambient.com/news/google-ads-android-tv-update-1511 [the-ambient.com]

    Samsung TVs are not running Android, of course, but they are not exactly saints considering they are a) suggesting people run anti-virus software on their smart tvs and b) have a generic disclaimer stating that if you don't want personalized ads based on what you talk about while in the same room as the TV, then stop talking out loud because the TV is always listening and any secrets you speak of may be transmitted to third parties.

    With that in mind, maybe look up your TV model to see if anyone on the internet has complained about what new updates have done to the TV, before you do anything rash with updating.

    Anyway it can't be good if the TV has to be disconnected from the network to allow the rest of your home to keep talking on-line. Probably, the TV is up to no good. If you are able to check firewall logs or anything outside of the TV that might log traffic or errors going out your internet connection... or even better, packet capture/sniff the TV traffic... you should do so. You might learn why it takes your network down--probably it is trying to upload something at full port speed onto a much slower internet connection, but the mystery is what it is uploading of yours. If it was trying to download stuff, you'd be slow, but probably not truly stuck until you unplugged the TV.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Thursday June 20 2019, @10:03PM (1 child)

    by inertnet (4071) on Thursday June 20 2019, @10:03PM (#858246) Journal

    I have a few internet servers running on an extra set of 8 IP addresses ( /29 ) on my network. At first I thought my servers were under attack, this only happens sporadically. One time this happened when I was in the living room, watching TV. The TV kept freezing every couple of seconds. I was too lazy to go to my computer to figure out what was going on, so I just unplugged the TV from my network. It immediately became normal again and the network was fine again. Even after reconnecting it stayed fine.

    tl;dr, I don't think it'll be easy for me to figure out what the TV was doing. Next time I'll just unplug the damned thing again.

    • (Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Friday June 21 2019, @03:21PM

      by Hyperturtle (2824) on Friday June 21 2019, @03:21PM (#858570)

      Good luck, then -- I'd go mad if I had servers go down because the TV had to be unplugged to get things working again, despite the network segmentation/isolation!

      Makes me think of that bastard operator from hell story; he had unplugged the lotus notes server to run his coffee maker at work, or let the cleaning staff vacuum, etc, and every time the server went down, he'd act like he was fixing it by plugging it back in. Except your servers aren't getting unplugged and plugged back in again to get things working, it's the appliance that is!