Remember Popcorn Time, the app that served as an easy-to-use front end for streaming torrents of movies and TV shows? Development of the MPAA's least-favorite app of the 2010s has been abandoned for years, but the "Netflix of Piracy" software is still installed on millions of devices that are just waiting to join a bot army. Researchers at Eye Security found the updater for a Popcorn Time fork called "Time4Popcorn" still running on tons of Windows, macOS, and Android devices located around the world, phoning home to now-abandoned web domains over unencrypted HTTP and running an outdated, insecure version of Chrome.
Abandoned Popcorn Time apps had to be disabled to prevent a zombie army
Researchers remotely shut down a forgotten Popcorn Time updater hackers could have used to make a botnet.

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- Stevie Bonifield
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- theverge.com ↗






