Smart TVs accounted for more vulnerability observations than any other connected-home device, as automated reconnaissance dominated attacks across 10.4 million households.
Bitdefender and Netgear’s latest IoT Security Landscape Report portrays the connected home as an increasingly crowded and exposed environment, with smart TVs emerging as the device class most frequently associated with vulnerability observations. The companies said they examined 5.4 billion security events and 1.2 billion vulnerability observations across around 10.4 million smart homes worldwide, giving the research unusually broad scope. The report found that the average household now contains 24 connected devices, up from 22 a year earlier, underscoring how quickly the attack surface inside the home is expanding.
Smart TVs accounted for 22.7% of all vulnerability observations, narrowly ahead of smart plugs at 22.4% and network-attached storage devices at 22%. Together, those three categories represented 67.1% of the vulnerabilities seen across the sample. Bitdefender and Netgear argued that televisions now sit at the centre of several different forms of risk: they can be direct targets, proxies for internet traffic, sensors for information gathering, or footholds into the wider home network. The report said smart TVs were the only category in which all four roles converged.
The report also suggests that most connected-home activity is still at the discovery stage rather than the exploitation stage. Automated reconnaissance, designed to find weakly protected devices and networks, made up 90.1% of detected attack activity. That pattern indicates many homes are being scanned and mapped before a more serious intrusion is attempted. The findings come as consumer devices remain online for years after purchase, often outlasting the software support that was intended to keep them secure.
Most of the weaknesses identified were not obscure or newly discovered. According to the report, 99.97% of device vulnerabilities were linked to publicly known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, while weak passwords and plaintext authentication accounted for only a small share of the total. That shifts attention towards patching discipline and product life cycles rather than exotic flaws. In effect, the report argues that long-lived household devices that remain connected after support ends are carrying a growing share of the security burden.
The study also broke down likely attack outcomes. Overflow errors accounted for about 54% of the weaknesses tracked, denial-of-service issues for roughly 18%, and memory corruption for around 17%. More severe categories were less common, with privilege escalation at 5.3%, code execution at 3.8% and information disclosure at 1.2%. Bitdefender and Netgear said attackers are also using artificial intelligence to compress the time between discovery and exploitation from days to hours. In comments quoted by the companies, Bitdefender’s Ciprian Istrate said the growing number of connected devices has created more entry points for attackers, while Netgear’s Chandan Nandakumaraiah said home security now depends not only on speed and coverage but also on visibility and protection at the router level.
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