Smart TVs and connected plugs accounted for a large share of recorded security weaknesses in household devices, according to Bitdefender’s 2026 IoT Security Landscape Report. The analysis covered approximately 10.4 million protected home routers between January and September.
Televisions represented 22.7% of vulnerability observations, followed by smart plugs at 22.4% linked with a known software flaw.
Top vulnerable device families (Source: Bitdefender)
Household electronics can stay in use for five to ten years, while their security support may last two to four years. Once updates stop, TVs, plugs and home storage systems can remain connected with unresolved flaws.
Automated scans dominate detected attack activity
Automated port scans accounted for 90.1% of detected attack-category events, with approximately 4.85 billion scan attempts recorded over the nine-month period.
These probes check for accessible services, including remote desktop connections, remote login services and administration interfaces. Finding an open service can provide a starting point for further attempts to gain access, but a scan does not establish that someone broke in.
Password brute-force attempts accounted for approximately 8.7% of attack-category events. Of the 466.6 million brute-force events reported, approximately 455 million targeted Remote Desktop Protocol, commonly used to access Windows computers remotely.
The detections include scans stopped at routers, attempted logins and exploit patterns detected and blocked. They do not establish how many households experienced a successful intrusion.
Free TV apps can share household connections
Citing findings from security firm Spur, the report describes software bundled into free smart-TV apps that can turn televisions into residential proxies after users accept consent terms.
The household’s broadband connection then carries a customer’s traffic for uses marketed as web scraping, advertising verification and market research. Websites receiving that traffic see the household’s public internet address.
Accepting an app’s terms authorizes the sharing, even though users may not understand how their connection will be used.
Viewing data and household profiling
Televisions can also collect information about what people watch and the devices around them.
Gamers Nexus findings cited in the report describe LG televisions collecting viewing data, voice recordings, geographical location, details of other devices on the local network and information about nearby wireless networks.
Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR, identifies material displayed on a television by matching content samples against a reference database. The technology is used to support personalized advertising.
Connected equipment can occupy several roles: an attack target, a proxy carrying outside traffic, a sensor collecting information or a foothold inside a network.
“Once inside, criminals can stay hidden and move laterally across the home network,” warned Chandan Nandakumaraiah, head of product and cybersecurity at NETGEAR.
