Protecting your smart TV and set-top box from being hacked | Kaspersky official blog
Brief
In 2026, the owner of an ordinary home router, smart TV, or TV box is a prime target for cybercriminals. These devices are readily recruited into botnets and residential proxy networks , which we’ve covered before.
Criminals “sublease” the infected device by letting outsiders pay to visit any website from the victim’s IP address, so it looks like the device’s owner is doing it. The service is in demand across all kinds of shady schemes: from ad fraud and spam campaigns to password bruteforcing and account hacking.
In our previous post, we described how home routers get recruited into these proxy networks; today we take a look at an even more vulnerable, and equally ubiquitous category of devices: smart TVs and TV boxes.
These appeal to criminals for two reasons. First, unlike computers and smartphones, TVs are almost always plugged into the power and have a fast internet connection.