“Crawled our entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including smartwatches and phones of our staff who didn’t even know we were working on this.” That is how Gamers Nexus investigator Steve Burke described what an LG smart TV did once the screen went dark, according to a Gadget Review report published September 7.
The report says LG’s webOS reportedly begins cataloguing every device on a home network when the TV goes into standby: your phone, a partner’s smartwatch, a child’s laptop, hardware that has nothing to do with watching television.
Standby, but not asleep
To most owners, standby means the set is sleeping. To the TV, the report suggests, it means the microphone stays live. Bench tests confirmed that the built-in mic can record audio in standby with the screen dark, under test conditions.
Pulling the Ethernet cable does not necessarily stop it. The TV reportedly stores recordings locally and uploads them the moment it reconnects, so going offline only delays the transfer. Audio capture can also reach compatible soundbars and external microphones within the LG ecosystem. In the report’s blunt phrasing, standby is “a setting, not a promise.”
Known security holes
The report adds a security problem on top. webOS has documented remote code execution flaws: CVE-2024-1885 in LG Signage webOS and CVE-2018-17173 in LG SuperSign EZ CMS. New zero-days are reportedly in responsible disclosure. The report is careful to call this a risk scenario, not a confirmed, widespread attack pattern. But documented vulnerabilities alongside demonstrated data collection, it says, is the kind of combination that worries researchers.
What the researchers advise
The researchers’ advice is to disconnect the LG TV from the internet entirely and plug in an external streaming stick, such as a Roku, Fire TV or Apple TV, over HDMI. Turning off ACR or voice assistants in the settings menu is not a reliable fix, they say, because the data collection reportedly runs deeper than those toggles reach. Physical disconnection is the only mitigation the report calls effective.
