some law enforcement authority and askAttack.Ransomvictims to payAttack.Ransomfictitious fines to regain control . Cauthon , who was the previous owner of the three-year-old TV , tried to help the new owner restore the device to its default factory settings , but did n't succeed even after receiving many suggestions and advice from other Twitter users . According to the software developer , when he first contacted LG 's tech support , he was told that a technician would have to come over and take a look for a fee of around $ 340 . The ransom amount itself was $ 500 although even payingAttack.Ransomthat would have been difficult because there was no way to click on the payment section to find the instructions on how to do so . The only thing that worked was just moving a mouse-like pointer on a portion of the TV screen via an accompanying smart remote . Eventually LG provided Cauthon with a solution that involved pressing and releasing two physical buttons on the TV in a particular order . This booted the TV , which runs the now defunct Android-based Google TV platform , into a recovery mode . The Android recovery mode allows wiping the data partition , which deletes all user settings , apps and data and is the equivalent of a factory reset . While this sounds straightforward , Cauthon 's experience suggests that many users would have difficulty figuring it out on their own and would probably be forced to pay for technical assistance . If recovering from smart TV ransomware infections can be hard , imagine what users would have to deal with if these programs start infecting other internet-of-things devices , as some security experts predict . In this case , the victim was lucky because the ransomware app was only a screen locker and not a program that encrypts files . Smart TVs have USB ports and allow connecting external hard disk drives in order to watch personal videos or photo collections -- the type of files that are valuable to users , especially if they 're not backed up