The Office TV May Be Getting Less Security Attention Than It Deserves

Smart TVs, plugs and network-attached storage accounted for 67.1% of vulnerability observations in Bitdefender and Netgear’s 2026 IoT research.

These devices serve different functions, yet share a weakness: they can stay connected for years while receiving far less attention than laptops or servers. For businesses installing similar equipment in meeting rooms and offices, the findings raise questions about what falls outside routine security management (Bitdefender and Netgear, 2026).

Across approximately 10.4 million protected home routers, researchers recorded 5.4 billion security events and 1.2 billion vulnerability observations between January and September. Those totals, though, require careful reading: the same weakness can be detected repeatedly, so a billion observations does not mean a billion different flaws or successful intrusions. The figures describe the scale of exposure within the monitored networks; establishing how often attackers exploited it requires separate evidence. (Bitdefender).

Of the vulnerabilities observed, 99.97% were CVEs (publicly known vulnerabilities). 90.1% of the detected attack activity was reconnaissance, suggesting most attacks are automated scans looking for accessible weaknesses. The criminals can go through hundreds of devices and the device owners will have no idea that anything at all is wrong (Bitdefender and Netgear, 2026).

A conference room TV is a good example of how that kind of exposure can become an organizational issue. The TV itself may be perfectly functional and present no real problems to the staff. It can run apps, it can communicate over the network, and if it has the right features, it can even take in microphone input. Its lifespan will be far longer than the period the manufacturer provides security updates.

Compromise can have repercussions which go well beyond the device itself. Cybersecurity Dive has looked at the potential uses that could arise, from surveillance to the exploitation of other network assets and the use of the device as a conduit for malicious traffic. The extent to which this is possible will of course vary according to the device, the vulnerability, and the network configuration. Finding a vulnerability doesn't necessarily mean that an attacker could do all three of those things. (Cybersecurity Dive, 2026). For the enterprise, the real issue is what the device can get to. A TV allowed to talk only to the services it needs is a very different proposition from one with unrestricted access to business systems. Isolating the connected devices from the sensitive resources can limit the impact of a compromise, and monitoring their connections may well reveal activity that the user would never see on the screen.

Home networks add another layer of complexity. The executive's work laptop may be subject to fairly rigorous corporate oversight, while the cameras, storage drives and TVs on the home network will be following quite different update schedules. Sharing a network in no way compromises the laptop itself, but it does create a second environment which is in itself worthy of security consideration.

Procurement and maintenance should belong in the same discussion since you need to establish the support life, update process, and owner of the connected equipment before you buy it. Once it's in place, it should be in the asset inventory with a replacement plan in place at the end of support. Otherwise, you've got a TV that's perfectly good as a display but effectively dead as a computer once the support life has expired.