You might not remember the Google’s own smart TV platform named as Google TV as it was a pretty bad failure. Even though it was not so successful, there are still some people who actually brought the devices that run Google TV.
The Google TV popularity is going down along with the number of devices that run it. On this Christmas, another smart TV running Google TV went dark.
A user named Darren Cauthon took the incident to Twitter and revealed that his LG smart TV which is running Google TV was infected with a malware when they tried to install a movie streaming application. By analysing the image he posted, it looks like a ransomware which requires the user to pay to gain access to the device storage.
We can conclude that the ransomware is not made to infect TVs but to target Android devices. Due to this, the TV is completely bricked due to its limited number of ports and functionality compared to Android device.
The only thing that we can do with the TV now is to flash a new firmware, for which we are left with only one option that is to use the firmware provided by LG. Ironically, LG is not willing to help the user remove the ransomware from his TV unless he pays. From his tweets, we can easily say that he could buy a new TV with the money that the company is asking for the service.
The cost of removing the malware by flashing the stock firmware is $340, which, given the fact that this is an old TV running a platform that’s no longer supported, makes absolutely no sense.
