Abandoned Time4Popcorn Build Left Hundreds of Thousands of Macs Open to Malware
Researchers disabled the update checker on over a million machines, but they still advise removing the app entirely.
A security firm, Eye Research, found that Time4Popcorn, an unofficial and long-abandoned build of the Popcorn Time streaming app, left a background update checker on Macs that kept running at every startup even after the app was no longer used. The checker downloaded and trusted whatever it fetched and held broad permissions to alter the system, while the domains it relied on had lapsed, so anyone who registered them could have pushed malicious software to affected machines. Eye Research says it seized one of the expired addresses, estimates 250,000 to 350,000 Macs were exposed, and used the checker to switch it off on more than a million Macs and Windows PCs before passing the remaining addresses to the Shadowserver Foundation. The fix leaves other weaknesses in place and some addresses remain uncontrolled, so the researchers recommend uninstalling the app outright, which is harder for users because the build was distributed under the Popcorn Time name.
Why it matters
The risk came from a forgotten component that kept running on Macs long after people stopped using the app, and it trusted anything it downloaded. Anyone who had registered one of the lapsed addresses could have delivered software to those machines, which is why the cleanup matters even for users who never opened the app. The fix is partial, so affected people cannot assume they are safe until the app itself is gone. Because the build carried the Popcorn Time name, users may not recognise it as the risky version, which makes uninstalling it harder than it sounds.
Series Abandoned Popcorn Time updater flaw
- Abandoned Time4Popcorn Build Left Hundreds of Thousands of Macs Open to Malware
- Abandoned Popcorn Time Updater Left Millions of Computers Open to Takeover
- Eye Security disables Popcorn Time updater on millions of machines to block possible botnet
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