Most “Smart” TVs use Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), essentially taking snapshots every 10+ms of what you watch and hear, then forwarding & selling that data to companies for ads, etc. I now feel it’s only a matter of time before this “feature” finds its way to our ever “smarter” PC monitors.
LG with the help of Windows is already installing adware when the right Device ID is detected.
☑️ To disable ACR on TV: https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/home-entertainment/how-to-disable-acr-tv/
To play devils advocate for them, if whoever is packaging fwup for the monitor either doesnt catch LG packaging malicious shit with it, or is for some reason allowing it to happen, it could happen.
but then you’d have the wrath of at least a thousand enraged linux nerds on your ass and their stock would probably get tanked for a day.
But I’m saying, what path does the installation take in order to even end up on disk? How would it get permission to run sudo/doas or gain root access in order to install shit, without my user/admin input?
Most linux distros have a program called fwupd that installs hardware related updates. That was my example of the way in because most hardware updates are proprietary.
Fwupd is for updating on-device firmware AFAIK. This “attack” uses windows update mechanism for automatic installation of drivers to push additional software directly on users’ PCs.
I don’t think I’ve ever been able to run fwupd without root privilege elevation and a confirmation prompt listing the incoming changes. Are there package managers out there running it for you? If so, gimme a list so I can stay the fuck away or break that script.
Discover has shown me a UEFI update before in the list of updates its wants to do and ive confirmed it. If people aren’t paying attention to updates and just updating its very much possible they could get something like that accidentally
For example, AMD recently removed RAM encryption without telling anyone via an update.
Ah, I forgot about the GUI updaters. More reason to stick with good old cli.