A team of hackers from Brazil have taken first place in a hackathon organized by the country’s telecoms regulator. The challenge was to develop a solution to prevent non-approved ‘pirate’ set-top devices from functioning in people’s homes. The team say they were able to remotely transfer code which completely disabled a target device. Once implemented, “there will be a general failure in most of the irregular boxes in use,” the hacker predicted.
Sounds like they would use DNS hijacking to trick the set top boxes into downloading malicious code that disables the device.
I wonder if something as simple as having a VPN active on the device or the network would mitigate this since you would be avoiding the ISP DNS.