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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.

Original Submission