1.3M Android-Based TV Boxes Backdoored; Researchers Still Don't Know How

Blessed by Google but full of ads :(

How long are there updates for old TV boxes no matter if AOSP, Android TV or Google TV?

Oh boy, let me tell you about my LG Google TV (55GA7900). It was awesome when it was brand new, I really enjoyed being able to install various apps (this is pre-roku days where it wasn't common place). After a couple years, they moved on to Android TV - but everything still worked and they still pushed out some occasional updates. Well, a few more years went by and it became EOL. LG pushed out one final update which fixed a few things and disabled the update feature altogether (Android 4.2.2). Well guess what? The update was junk and made it where you could not scan for over-the-air channels. The scanner would just crash and no channels would be found. There was no way to go directly to a channel or manual add channels - scan only. So here I was with a smart tv that couldn't even watch TV over the air. I'm sure LG was also to blame, not just Google, but I sure wouldn't buy or recommend a google TV. Looks like they are now switching back to Google TV and the poor folks who were duped into getting an Android TV will be the next to experience abandonment.

My hunch is that most of these "Android TVs" are cheap jailbroken devices loaded with Kodi and links to servers full of pirated content. These things have been around a long time.

I can't resist pointing out that, ironically, these devices are compromised before they even have the chance to benefit from NPUs. Imagine the incentive to damage if they were equipped with that kind of processing power, botnets with ML capabilities would be an even bigger target now.