- Jan 24, 2011
- 9,378
Virus makers are evolving along with the times, and have adopted classic desktop malware to target and infect new technology, like smart TVs, as Kaspersky Labs researchers discovered.
It all started when a Reddit user complained that his sister got a virus on his smart TV, something he described as a DNS hijacker. In this particular case, every time he would open his smart TV's Web browser, a popup message would appear, asking the user to call a number to fix his malware problem. Often referred to as browser ransomware, this is a cross between scareware, tech support scams, and ransomware, which make the user's browser unusable.
Since security researchers rarely see complex malware on smart TVs, and most of the times it arrives there by accident, targeting the TV's underlying Android OS, the OS used with most smart TVs, Kaspersky's staff had to analyze the case.
Their investigation led them back to a series of domains, employed in the past to spread various other malware, already blacklisted in their company's Kaspersky Web Protection product.
They also managed to track down part of the ransom message to some source code snippets uploaded to the ddecode.com and PasteBin websites. Putting these snippets together, they managed to reconstruct the malware's malicious JavaScript code that gets executed in the browser and shows the annoying popup.
Read more: Browser Scareware Evolves, Now Targets Smart TVs
