A team of hackers from Brazil have taken first place in a hackathon organized by the country’s telecoms regulator. The challenge was to develop a solution to prevent non-approved ‘pirate’ set-top devices from functioning in people’s homes. The team say they were able to remotely transfer code which completely disabled a target device. Once implemented, “there will be a general failure in most of the irregular boxes in use,” the hacker predicted.

  • @Imprint9816@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 days ago

    Sounds like they would use DNS hijacking to trick the set top boxes into downloading malicious code that disables the device.

    I wonder if something as simple as having a VPN active on the device or the network would mitigate this since you would be avoiding the ISP DNS.