Retrofitting the Mess: Smart TV Proxyware and Ancient curl Vulnerabilities
Reading the latest ThreatsDay bulletin, I can't help but agree—this isn't elite tradecraft; it's just negligence paying off. The sheer volume of "trusted" apps being hijacked is staggering. Specifically, the report on Smart TV proxyware hit home. We're seeing consumer-grade hardware weaponized as residential proxy nodes to mask malicious traffic origin.
Then there's the nightmare of the 24-year-old curl bug. If you haven't patched libcurl recently, you're playing with fire. The vulnerability allows attackers to inject cookies into connection pools via SOCKS5 proxies (CVE-2023-38545 vibes, but new context for 2026).
If you need to check your exposure on your fleet, run this quick audit for the vulnerable version strings:
# Check for vulnerable curl versions (Example: 50000000 // 50MB threshold
| order by SentBytes desc
Anyone else struggling to justify the cost of a dedicated VLAN for Smart TVs vs. the risk of them being part of a botnet?
VLANs are non-negotiable at this point. We wall off all IoT devices—Smart TVs, smart fridges, you name it. They get an isolated subnet with strictly ACL'd egress to only the CDN IPs they need for updates and streaming. If it can't be patched reliably, it shouldn't have unrestricted access to the LAN.
The curl issue is particularly nasty for us because of legacy internal tools. We found a bunch of python scripts using pycurl that were linked against the system library. We ended up having to update the base OS image just to shake out the dependency. Don't forget to scan your container base images too; alpine:3.15 isn't looking so hot anymore.
Great KQL snippet. I tweaked it slightly to exclude known legitimate update servers (Samsung/LG services) and added a filter for InitiatingProcessSHA256 to focus on unsigned binaries. The sheer amount of noise from smart devices alone is why most SOC analysts miss this stuff initially until the bandwidth bills spike.
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