While a Wi-Fi Direct connection could let an attacker take over your TV, they couldn’t do much with it other than change the channel or enable screen mirroring. On the other hand, while this exploit seems very easy to pull off, it might be of limited benefit to a potential cybercriminal. If an attacker happened to know the MAC address of your smartphone's Wi-Fi chip, for example, he or she could stand outside your house with his or her own laptop or smartphone, replicate your smartphone's MAC address and get control of your smart TV.Īfter Neseso reported its findings to the manufacturer last month, Samsung investigated the issue and apparently told the researchers that it was “not a security threat.”

In practice, it’s not that hard to spoof a MAC address. In theory, this means that only devices that the user has personally authorized can connect to the TV. Devices are identified according to their MAC addresses, which are unique IDs assigned to every network port on every networked device. The UN32J5500, on the other hand, simply cross-references a device attempting to connect against a whitelist of devices that the user has already pre-authorized. Most Wi-Fi Direct devices ask users to provide a password or PIN when connecting, in order to prevent unwanted intrusions. (Think about a TV that wirelessly connects to your smartphone so that you can use the phone as a remote, for example.) The TV can use Wi-Fi Direct, a convenient protocol that allows two or more devices to connect directly to each other wirelessly without going through a router.

Samsung tv disable wifi