Your Smart TV Might Be Attacking Your Windows PC: Here's How

Owning a smart TV can sometimes be a headache, but no one expects their 4K flatscreen to start attacking their Windows PC. But that's exactly what appears to have happened with certain Hisense TVs. Sound designer Priscilla Snow reported a slew of seemingly unrelated issues with their PC, such as display settings refusing to open, MIDI controllers and capture cards no longer working, the taskbar disappearing, and even Task Manager not acting right. After attempting to troubleshoot the issue, Snow finally identified a Hisense 50Q8G as the source of the problem.

A look into their PC's registry revealed that Snow's TV, supposedly one of the best smart TVs available, had been generating a lot of IDs for a Windows feature called Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). These IDs supposedly make it easier for Windows to identify a device, but because the Hisense TV had created so many of them, Windows had become overwhelmed trying to process them. In essence, the TV had inadvertently created a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Snow's computer.

After isolating the TV on her network, and some fixes to windows, Snow's computer returned to normal. This strange bug is a reminder that every device on a network can impact the other, and that your troubleshooting efforts should always take a holistic look at the entire network environment. It's unclear whether this bizarre TV bug is a widespread issue. So, here's what to look out for with your own smart TV.

It remains to be seen whether the issue of a Hisense running Android TV software overwhelming a Windows PC was relegated to Priscilla Snow's TV in particular, Hisense TVs in general, or other company's TVs too. If you own a Hisense TV or any device that runs Android TV (not to be confused with the newer Google TV), it would be a good idea to check for this problem, especially if your Windows computer has been having any odd issues.

To check for the problem in Windows and fix it:

1. Use the Win+R shortcut to open Run
2. Type, "regedit" and press Enter. Registry Editor will open. If prompted by a security notification asking whether you'd like to allow the program to make changes to your device, click Yes.
3. In Registry Editor, follow this path: ComputerHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMControlSet001ServicesDeviceAssociationServiceStateStore
4. Usually, you will see a number of subfolders corresponding to the devices on your network being recognized by Windows. If you are experiencing this smart TV issue, you will see hundreds or thousands of items. If that's the case, continue to the next step. If not, your computer is most likely safe.
5. If your computer is affected, you can find the full solution that worked for Snow in this Microsoft support thread.

So far, there's been no word from Hisense regarding this bizarre issue. The best case scenario would be that Priscilla's unit had a unique bug.