There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission.

At this years Defcon conference security researcher Pedro Cabrera held a talk titled  "SDR Against Smart TVs; URL and channel injection attacks" that showed how easy it is to take over a modern internet connected smart TV with a transmit capable SDR and drone. The concept he demonstrated is conceptually simple - just broadcast a more powerful signal so that the TV will begin receiving the fake signal instead. However, instead of transmitting with extremely high power, he makes use of a drone that brings a HackRF SDR right in front of the targets TV antenna. The HackRF is a low cost $100-$300 software defined radio that can transmit.

While the hijacking of TV broadcasts is not a new idea, Pedro's talk highlights the fact that smart TVs now expose significantly more security risks to this type of attack. In most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand and some places in Western Asia and the Middle East they use smart TV's with the HbbTV standard. This allows for features like enhanced teletext, catch-up services, video-on-demand, EPG, interactive advertising, personalisation, voting, games, social networking, and other multimedia applications to be downloaded or activated on your TV over the air via the DVB-T signal.

The HbbTV standard carries no authentication. By controlling the transmission, it's possible to display fake phishing messages that ask for passwords and transmit the information back over the internet. A hacker could also inject key loggers and install cryptominers.

Recorded talks from the Defcon conference are not up on YouTube yet, but Wired recently ran a full story on Pedros talk, and it's worth checking out here. The slides from his presentation can be found on the Defcon server, and below are two videos that show the attack in action, one showing the ability to phish out a password. His YouTube channel shows off several other hijacking videos too.