“It’s astonishing. It’s spooky because there aren’t a lot of ways you can get into someone’s cable box,” said Fred Cate, research director for the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity. “The most common ways would be using a remote control, an infrared device, but that’s line of sight. You usually have to be in the room or within a close distance and clear vision to the box you’re changing the channel on or doing the typing on."Um, what? If the cable box is running software and on the network, the hacker doesn't need "line of sight."
Aren’t a lot of these boxen running open source Linux? Linux is as hackproof as it is administered to be. If it is a box where everything merrily runs as root, expect issues.