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.

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9 points
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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.

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You don’t even need a VPN to use a different DNS server.

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Yeah for sure. Maybe even something as simple as setting the network DNS to Quad9

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