Warnung an irische „zwielichtige Boxen“-Besitzer nach groß angelegten Cyberangriffen auf alltägliche Streaming-Geräte


Latest instalment of project fear. It’s not very subtle is it?

Yeah I’m grand thanks

Sure thing 😂

Brought to you by Sky Ireland I bet.

Seriously though, DDOS attacks? I got a chuckle out of that.

The TV Licence Detector Vans are now paroling your area.

sigh , its a day ending in y isnt it

Not a dodgy box fan but Jesus that article is transparent and pathetic

They’re not wrong about them being vulnerable to hackers; I doubt the lads putting them together give two fucks about security in the first place, and they’re probably not receiving any security updates for whatever software is installed on them. The biggest risk would be the hackers using a compromised dodgy box for attacks on other networks, like the article notes, but it’s also not good to have a compromised device with access to your own internal home network; if you aren’t very diligent about network security and keeping the dodgy box fully segregated from other devices on your network, it’s not impossible that a hacker could use it to gain access to other devices in your home like your PCs. That is rather less likely than the botnet possibility, given the effort involved (most hackers are going for the low-hanging fruit), but it is still a risk nonetheless.

I’ve never owned a dodgy box but given how often I see articles talking about the things, you’d swear everyone in the country had one, and given how every article I’ve ever seen talks about the things, you’d swear it was a requirement to be initiated into a gang to acquire one.

They should have seen the risks I was taking on Limewire back in the day. Family computer was riddled

No more dangerous than any other IOT device

And what info exactly are they going to harvest from my smart TV exactly? My Netflix searches? They can work away

They’re sending the virus through Bebo accounts guys. If someone you don’t know shares one of their three daily loves with you, it could be one of the cyber attacks. Please be careful and don’t fall for it.

More would be taken from a hack on a subscription service than my fire stick specifically, and both would be just as common

Im calling bs on this

For anyone interested in the technical side of things here is the investigation behind the scale and risk of it

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/01/the-kimwolf-botnet-is-stalking-your-local-network/

In short there is a whole side of criminal business and them fucking each other over. One group distributing smart tv software with a back door to sell your home network as basically a VPN to customers. Other group exploited that groups software to spread their version to all devices connected to the same network as your dodgy box and sell your internet for DoS attacks.

A lot of recent internet outages were caused by attacks that came from those types of devices

Even if it’s a scare mongering tactic to make you pay for Eir, as other are trying to imply in comments, cmon you’re gonna plug something to your internet from some guy selling these cheapo boxes to let you watch tv for free? They are dodgy for a reason, especially their source.

Pro tip
Use dodgy box for dodgy media not to login to your bank account. All anyone can steal from doggy box is your viewing history which should be ok unless you are into freaky stuff.

I wonder if an Irish dodgy box would work in the US.

I keep hearing about them from y’all and I gotta wonder:

1. How they work: both for the consumer and internally
2. How they came to be in the first place

I’m guessing you pay *one* subscription rather than five or six for access to “legally obtained” content? That’s how I would go about paying for the bandwidth they’d require.

You’re out there somewhere, Beer Baron! And I’ll find you,“

And there you have it, what this article is really about, Sky scaremongering again. Once they gain access, sure they can’t just access the device remotely ffs, one would have to be stupid enough to put these on an unfiltered Internet connection.