For those who read even the first paragraph it's a credential stuffing attack. As in people used the same username/password combinations that were leaked or phished.
Use a password manager people.
Use a password manager people.
Long winded way of saying that other devices do it as well
If you're already buying a smart tv device and putting it on your network, downloading an app that gives you better control over it doesn't seem like a step too far. Especially with phone permissions being more finely grained than whatever the box itself is doing.
Anyone who has supported digital devices for friends and family (especially elderly ones) knows it is in fact not easy.
These accounts exist for the commercial benefit of companies. They could tie authorization to the hardware if they wanted to, like it used to be before the internet, but they don't. The idea that consumers need to do data and security management for the commercial benefit of corporations has gotten absurd. We're doing their IT for them, and still getting hacked even when we do it right. Remember Equifax? Pepperidge farms remembers Equifax.
That said, it's possible to come up with an easy to remember scheme and is unique (like {ServiceName}@{houseNumber} or the like).
In that case, we generate passwords and try them against every (hash, salt) pair in the database. We can usually crack 60 percent of a database this way, and more if we use AI driven cracking (PassGAN, 2017).
It makes sense to try variants of "netflix{birthday}" early on, since that uncovers a significant portion of the database. Your mom would have just been unlucky to be part of that low-hanging cohort.
“Characters should be adjacent on that particular gridded qwerty keyboard that TVs tend to use or two-off in a single directions. Double characters are also ok. Long strings of upper or lower case letters.”
I guess the number of possible passwords is something like 26*(9^(n-1)), ignoring special characters and (rare) case changes. Also ignoring the edges of the keyboard, which probably really messes my path up because it isn’t very tall.
This lack of focus on Casting is certainly causing it feel like it is becoming obsolete. For instance many Android apps now have bugs when it comes to casting (stuttering video or the cast button only showing up when restarting the app).