Televisions made up 22.7% of the vulnerability observations in Bitdefender’s 2026 IoT Security Landscape Report, the largest share of any device type, with smart plugs close behind at 22.4%. The security firm built the report with NETGEAR from data on about 10.4 million protected home routers collected between January and September 2026.
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A vulnerability observation is a match between a device on a home network and a known software flaw. It is not a count of distinct products, and it does not mean any home was broken into.
Help Net Security summarized the findings on October 30, and the full figures sit in Bitdefender’s own consumer report PDF, where page 15 lists televisions at 22.7%, smart plugs at 22.4% and network storage drives at 22%. Together those three categories account for 67.1% of all observations on page 23. The accompanying Bitdefender blog post puts the telemetry at about 5.4 billion security events and 1.20 billion vulnerability observations, with television traffic at 270.3 million of them.
Smart TV flaws against a 2-to-4-year support window
The underlying problem is a mismatch in lifespans. Households keep connected electronics for 5 to 10 years, while manufacturers often provide security updates for only two to four. After that, a television can stay online with every newly published flaw unpatched. The NETGEAR write-up of the report states it plainly: families keep smart devices for 5 to 10 years, and most makers send safety updates for just 2 to 4.
The ranking moved from a year earlier. SecureWorld’s account of the report says streaming devices (25.9%) and smart TVs (21.3%) led in the 2025 edition, and that the 2026 report treats the television as the one device that is at once a target, a proxy, a sensor and a foothold. The report also cautions that LG-branded labels account for 197.4 million observations, or 16.6%, because LG sets are common in its data, not because of a ranking of LG’s security practices.
Televisions also run apps, store accounts and sit on the same network as laptops and phones, so an unpatched set is a foothold, not just a nuisance. Chandan Nandakumaraiah, head of product and cybersecurity at NETGEAR, warned in the Help Net Security coverage that criminals who get inside can stay hidden and move laterally across the home network.
Residential proxies and viewing data collected by TV software
The report goes beyond flaws. Citing the research firm Spur, it says software bundled into free smart TV apps can turn a television into a residential proxy once the owner accepts consent terms. The traffic is marketed for web scraping, ad verification and market research, and the websites on the other end see the household’s public IP address instead of the buyer’s. Owners may not understand how their connection is being used.
It also cites Gamers Nexus findings that LG televisions collected viewing data, voice recordings, geographic location, details of other devices on the local network and information about nearby wireless networks. Automatic content recognition, which matches what is on screen against a reference database, mainly supports personalized advertising. Bitdefender describes connected equipment as potentially an attack target, a proxy for outside traffic, a sensor collecting information or a foothold inside the home.
NETGEAR’s write-up adds that the 4.85 billion attempts work out to roughly two per home per day, and that Slovak officials found a hidden remote-control method in 279 newly delivered traffic cameras while researchers found a factory back door in 20 router models from one Chinese manufacturer. Those cases show that some risk arrives with the hardware, before any owner has a chance to patch it.
Attack counts, and the gaps in them
The same data set recorded 4.85 billion automated port scans over nine months, 90.1% of about 5.38 billion attack-category events. Password guessing totaled 466.6 million attempts, of which roughly 455 million targeted Windows Remote Desktop. Bitdefender is explicit that a scan or a recorded attempt shows something tried to get in, not that a device was compromised, and the detections do not say how many households were successfully breached. Bitdefender sells the router-level protection behind NETGEAR Armor, so its advice leans toward network-wide defenses, a commercial interest worth keeping in mind when weighing the report.
Bitdefender’s recommendations are practical: inventory connected devices, check which still receive security updates, enable automatic updates, replace passwords that came from the factory, switch off port forwarding and UPnP that are not needed, and remove unused apps from televisions and streaming sticks. Devices whose support has ended are candidates for retirement.
One figure invites a second look. The blog’s own totals work out to roughly 22.5% for televisions, while the PDF prints 22.7%, a gap likely from rounding in the published totals. The open question for buyers is how long a given television will receive patches, because few manufacturers state that date at purchase.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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