Tag Archives: AppleTV

[AppleTV] AppleTV gets safer… who cares?

incomplete Tales

It is commonly known that Apple’s products don’t belong to the safest products in the computer industry. For quite some time now: Botnet builders are using the well known zombie technique to gain control over AppleTV to use it in botnets. This is due to AppleTV’s large market share (of about 0,5%)… Yes…

This is how these Botnet builders do it:

  1. they walk into stores and buy newly released blurays like “I am Legend”
  2. they illegally decrypt it
  3. convert it to x264 for better compatibility as eMail-attachments (we all know: many providers only allow 10GB per attachment)
  4. then they modify the x264 headers to include buffer overflows adjusted to work on AppleTV only.

For several years now bad guys were sending prepared x264 movies as email-attachments. But now the time is up. Apple released a security update for AppleTV, that prevents buffer overflows. All our AppleTVs will from now on be safe from bad botnetters…

The truth behind it

Ok, you got us here. Besides from kidding: there is no need for this update. The only reason in our opinion is: they wanna stop people using AppleTV for more than the allowed things. There are no buffer overflows that we are aware that are being used by botnetters currently. Since AppleTV’s market share is so low, this wouldn’t even make any sense from an economical point of view for the botnetters.