TMCnet Feature

A South Carolina Best Buy (News - Alert) is learning the hard way that sex doesn't always sell in advertising, especially when the TV "ad" is courtesy of a couple of local pranksters.

The electronics retailer was forced to apologize this week after an extremely pornographic image was displayed on smart TVs throughout a Greenville, South Carolina Best Buy for several minutes, according to a local CBS news channel. Hackers used the smart TVs’ Wi-Fi connections to gain access to the displays and import the image, which was seen by several families until a manager eventually took it down.

Customer Gloria Berg, who was at the Best Buy store with her son and grandchildren, told the news channel that the same thing happened the night before, at least according to the manager, who told her that there was nothing the store could do to stop the hack.

"They, like, brush it off like it's...who cares? Nobody cares. It's pornography. And we are getting adjusted to that kind of mentality. That's why we are losing our morals," Berg told CBS.

Berg has since filed a complaint with the police, who plan on looking into the incident after assigning an investigator.

As for Best Buy, they issued the following statement:

"Two individuals accessed our store's wireless signal to broadcast inappropriate content on a smart television display. In both cases, we worked immediately to disable the inappropriate content. We greatly apologize for this unfortunate incident and we are working to ensure that it does not happen again."

The incident highlights the inherent danger of attaching yet another one of our devices to the Internet, putting TVs squarely in the crosshairs of hackers to either cause havoc or pilfer personal information. Similar to computers, smartphones have become a major target for hackers in the last two years. Are our TVs next?

All four major television makers – LG, Sony, Samsung (News - Alert) and Panasonic – have lofty expectations for smart TVs in 2012. The market is expected to more than double this year, with Samsung predicting 25 million smart TV sales in 2012, accounting for around half of its overall flat TV shipments.