Cybersecurity · Internet Infrastructure
LG Electronics said it will block from its smart TV platform any app built around residential proxy SDKs — software that quietly routes third-party internet traffic through the TVs sitting in people's living rooms.
A free "fish tank" wallpaper app on your smart TV is not just a screensaver. In recent months, security researchers discovered that a large slice of smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs — small pieces of code that turn the TV into an exit node, relaying other people's internet traffic over the household's own IP address.
The mechanism is straightforward. An app bundles an SDK from a residential proxy provider. Once installed, the SDK opens a network tunnel on the TV and forwards outbound requests from remote users through that tunnel. Because the traffic exits from a real home broadband connection, it looks like ordinary user activity — exactly what proxy operators sell to web scrapers, ad verifiers, and, in the worst cases, threat actors. The TV itself is a good relay: it stays powered on and signed in for days on end, and nobody ever reviews the permissions of a TV app the way they review a phone app.
Security researchers at Spur scanned 6,038 apps across the LG webOS and Samsung Tizen stores and found residential proxy SDKs in 2,058 of them — roughly one in three. The finding was followed in mid-July by news that the FBI had seized the NetNut proxy network, a botnet of up to two million smart TVs and streaming boxes that had been recruited into a commercial proxy service.
LG's response came this week: a statement that the company will suspend any smart TV app it finds to include residential proxy SDKs. Earlier, LG had said the SDKs were not officially supported, but enforcement was weak. The new policy moves the line from a disclaimer to an actual ban, and it follows broader public scrutiny of the practice by outlets including Krebs on Security, The Hacker News, and Includ Security.
The move matters because it shifts responsibility from the individual user to the platform. A household's IP address and home network traffic are not the user's to sell, yet proxy SDKs quietly claim that right. A platform-level ban is one of the few realistic controls: once an app is removed from the store, households that never noticed it were installed are no longer silently participating in the network.
The deeper question the policy raises is not just about LG. Residential proxy SDKs are a symptom of a wider "app-as-infrastructure" economy, in which devices left always-on — TVs, routers, security cameras — become nodes in services their owners did not agree to join. Banning the SDK is a start; preventing the next SDK, on the next always-on device, requires the same scrutiny.