The LG TV kept recording after it was unplugged from the internet
Researchers say a compromised LG television could capture audio with the screen apparently off — and hold that audio until the connection came back.
A television is the one computer in the house nobody thinks of as a computer. It sits in the living room or the bedroom, it has a microphone, an app store, and the same Wi-Fi as your phone and your laptop. On September 7, 2026, Malwarebytes Labs wrote up an investigation by Gamers Nexus, done with Level1Techs and independent security researchers, that looked at several LG TV models. What they describe is not a screen. It's a networked machine with ears.
The team says the tested LG TVs identified other devices on the home network — phones, PCs, printers, switches, smart-home hardware — and collected nearby Wi-Fi network names, signal information and device identifiers. Then the part that stops you: researchers demonstrated that a compromised TV could capture audio through its microphone, including when the TV appeared to be off. They also showed the TV storing audio while unplugged from the internet, and retrieving it once the connection was restored.
Two different things got mixed into one story, and it's worth pulling them apart, because they have different fixes. Some of what the researchers found is how the product is meant to work: the TV recognises what's on screen through Automated Content Recognition — it takes a sample of what's shown or heard, turns it into a digital fingerprint, and matches that fingerprint against a reference database to work out which show, which ad, which habit. That's a settings problem. You can turn a lot of it off.
The rest is not a settings problem. The researchers also reported remote-code-execution vulnerabilities to LG — meaning a way to make the television run code an attacker chose — and they are holding back the details while responsible disclosure runs its course. No checkbox in the menu protects you from that. And a compromised TV isn't only a privacy story: Malwarebytes notes it could give an attacker a foothold on a home or business network, access to audio, or a route to probe other devices.
The offline recording is the detail that changes how this feels. "No internet" has always been the ordinary person's safety net — pull the plug, nothing leaves. Here the audio simply waited.
Put the two halves together and you get the mechanism. The network scan tells someone which devices live in your home. Advertising IDs and viewing fingerprints tell them what you watch. Audio tells them what you say near the screen. Individually each looks minor. Combined, per the investigation, it supports a detailed profile of a household — and it's assembled by a device most people never update, never read the consent screens for, and leave switched on for a decade.
Anyone who took the cheapest smart TV in the shop because the dumb one cost more — which is most people renting their first flat, and most students sharing one. The microphone in that deal was never priced in. It also touches anyone who works from home on calls in the same room as the screen, and anyone with a landlord's or a previous tenant's TV already mounted on the wall, running firmware they've never once updated. And it's a live problem for parents who put a smart TV in a child's room and assumed that off means off.
The researchers have not published full details of the remote-code-execution flaws while responsible disclosure is ongoing. That's the thing to watch: when those details come out, and what LG ships in a firmware update before they do. Malwarebytes names no date and no deadline for either — so the honest answer is that the timetable belongs to the disclosure process, and nobody in this story has put a clock on it.
The advice at the end of the Malwarebytes piece is to put televisions, cameras and speakers on a separate guest network, away from your phones and laptops. Read that again. The recommended way to live with your TV is to treat it as a stranger's device that happens to be in your house.
Sources: Malwarebytes Labs, "LG TV flaws could let attackers listen in, even in standby mode", by Pieter Arntz, September 7, 2026, reporting an investigation by Gamers Nexus with Level1Techs and independent security researchers.
Независимое тестирование показало, что телевизор в спальне сканирует все устройства в доме и способен записывать разговоры даже с выключенным экраном — и сохраняет их до восстановления связи.
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