Security researchers neutralize dormant Popcorn Time updaters to prevent potential botnet
Researchers from Eye Security discovered that abandoned updaters for the defunct piracy app Popcorn Time remained active on millions of devices. These updaters, running on Windows, macOS, and Android, communicated via unencrypted HTTP to abandoned domains, creating a significant risk for botnet recruitment. To mitigate this, the team registered the domains and pushed a self-disabling update, neutralizing the threat without deleting user files. By March, over 2 million update downloads had been distributed before the domains were transferred to the Shadowserver Foundation.