The day has come, Sharp and Philips smart TV running the Android TV OS could be infected by a ransomware dubbed FLocker ransomware.

When a journalist asked me which is a possible evolution of ransomware I had no doubt, the Internet of Things. I was thinking of ransomware that infects medical devices and Smart objects in our homes.

The day has come, Sharp and Philips smart TV running the Android TV OS could be infected by a ransomware dubbed FLocker (short for “Frantic Locker”).  FLocker, aka ANDROIDOS_FLOCKER.A, is a ransomware specifically designed to target Android mobile devices and smart TVs.

FLocker isn’t a new threat, it has been around for a year and crooks delivered it to the victims via spam SMS campaigns or sharing malicious links.

The FLocker ransomware was first spotted on May 2015, security experts from Trend Micro detected more than 7,000 strains of the same malware. The threat actors behind the FLocker ransomware has updated over the time the threat improving it and making had its detection by security solutions.  Over the past few months, the experts observed a number of spikes and drops in the number of iterations released in the wild, in the last wave of infection observed in the mid-April the researchers detected over 1,200 variants.

“The latest variant of FLocker is a police Trojan that pretends to be US Cyber Police or another law enforcement agency, and it accuses potential victims of crimes they didn’t commit. It then demands 200 USD worth of iTunes gift cards,” states the analysis published by TrendMicro. “Based on our analysis, there is also no major difference between a FLocker variant that can infect a mobile device and one that affects smart TVs.”

The last interaction discovered by the experts pretends to be an enforcement agency and threatens the victims of crimes they didn’t commit. It locks the device by demanding a 200 USD-ransomware worth of iTunes gift cards, it’s ridiculous a cyber police that requires iTunes gift cards instead cash.