Abandoned Popcorn Time Updaters Pose a Botnet Risk
Popcorn Time, an open-source front end for streaming torrents, may be largely forgotten, but remnants of it remain active on a significant number of devices.
Researchers at Eye Security discovered that the updater for a fork called Time4Popcorn was still operating on Windows, macOS, and Android devices worldwide. The updater contacted web domains that had since been abandoned, making use of unencrypted HTTP connections and an outdated, insecure version of Chrome.
Although the application was no longer being developed, the surviving update infrastructure created a potential path for attackers to turn installed copies into bots. The researchers and those responsible for the software ultimately disabled the abandoned apps, effectively preventing the old updater from joining a larger botnet.
The episode illustrates how forgotten software and infrastructure can remain operational long after a project disappears. Devices that continue to run abandoned update mechanisms may remain exposed even when users no longer receive new versions or security fixes.