Samsung bans smart TV apps that share users’ internet connections with strangers
Several popular Samsung smart TV apps contain code that share the owner’s internet connection with strangers, potentially putting millions of Samsung smart TVs at risk of hijacking, according to new security research published on Monday. Some of these apps claim to have been installed on hundreds of millions of smart TVs in people’s homes, per the app developers. At least one of the smart TV apps was a simple Pac-Man game that Samsung had endorsed and prominently featured in its “Editor’s Choice” section on customers’ TV screens.
- ▪Several popular Samsung smart TV apps contain code that share the owner’s internet connection with strangers, potentially putting millions of Samsung smart TVs at risk of hijacking, according to new security research published on Monday.
- ▪Some of these apps claim to have been installed on hundreds of millions of smart TVs in people’s homes, per the app developers.
- ▪At least one of the smart TV apps was a simple Pac-Man game that Samsung had endorsed and prominently featured in its “Editor’s Choice” section on customers’ TV screens.
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Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/03/samsung-bans-smart-tv-apps-that-share-users-internet-connections-with-strangers/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:10:41 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-03T12:15:40.977Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-03T12:15:40.977Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 64KbNmrarYzB · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Several popular Samsung smart TV apps contain code that share the owner’s internet connection with strangers, potentially putting millions of Samsung smart TVs at risk of hijacking, according to new security research published on Monday. Some of these apps claim to have been installed on hundreds of millions of smart TVs in people’s homes, per the app developers. At least one of the smart TV apps was a simple Pac-Man game that Samsung had endorsed and prominently featured in its “Editor’s Choice” section on customers’ TV screens. These apps contain software that funnels outsiders’ web traffic through ordinary home and office internet connections, known as residential proxy networks (or “resproxies”), which are increasingly being linked to cybercrime.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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