Cheap Android TV boxes are running an ad-fraud botnet.

Transcript

There's a cheap Android TV box sold on Amazon and Best Buy right now that is secretly running two different crimes, and it picks which one based on whether your TV is on. Researchers at Bitsight traced about thirty eight thousand of these boxes to a Chinese ad fraud operation called Fengwo Group. Here's the trick. When your television is on, the box quietly rents your home internet connection out as a proxy to other buyers. When your TV is off, it switches jobs. It pretends to be a Samsung or a Xiaomi phone and spends the night clicking ads on fake news sites, earning an estimated fifty thousand dollars a day for one operator. There's no fix once it's compromised. The malware ships in the firmware itself. If there's a no name streaming box under your TV, that twenty five dollar price tag was never really about the hardware.