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Comment by debaserab2 | Hacker News Reader

No it's not. Not when all basic TV functionality is handled through its operating system.

I have a Sony Bravia Smart TV. The only thing I use on it is the screen, the power button, and the volume control.

Everything else is handled by the Internet connected Amazon Fire TV stick I plug into it. It is effectively a dumb TV and will not get infected by malware.

Unless it can be infected using the stick as a proxy (though I haven't seen that as a possible vulnerability yet).

That'd be quite the feat, at the only connectivity between the stick and TV is via HDMI.

Ethernet over HDMI is a thing.

Got a link?

http://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/hdmi_1_4/hec.aspx

Although with the way I've got my house wired, HDMI over Ethernet would be more useful.

Wow, that is scary

But it only matters if it's implemented on both ends, which it might not be.

Well... considering Light Bulbs can now be infected over the air:

http://boingboing.net/2016/11/09/a-lightbulb-worm-could-take...

I would agree odds are low of something that insidious... but it's hard to say "it'd be impossible for my TV to get hacked" when even light bulbs are getting attacked.

https://hackaday.com/2015/08/09/def-con-hdmi-cec-fuzzing/

I have an LG with WebOS and try to use my TV the same as you. I don't have it connected to wifi so it's unlikely that it will get infected with malware anytime soon, but it did crash yesterday when I turned it off at the end of the night. I had to pull out the power plug to turn it off.

That's one thing that never happened to me with a (truly) dumb TV and I've only owned this one for a month. I sure hope the CPU hardware running this OS doesn't degrade as quickly as normal consumer PC hardware and I can expect it to run as quick and reliably as it does now in ten years from now (like the TV it replaced did).

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