Dead Popcorn Time Updater Put Millions of Computers at Risk of Takeover

Eye Security researchers have disabled the update mechanism of an abandoned Popcorn Time fork and sinkholed its domains.

A BitTorrent client that allowed users to view movies downloaded from the web, Popcorn Time was highly popular over a decade ago, but the project was abandoned in 2014. A legal alternative has been in the works since early 2025.

The vulnerable update mechanism targeted by Eye Security belongs to Time4Popcorn, a fork of the original that has been distributed under the name Popcorn Time.

Eye Security discovered that the abandoned updater is connecting to its remote servers over HTTP to request updates, and that many of the update domains have been abandoned, while others are owned by third parties and parked.

The updater runs in the background at system boot, does not feature code signing, and downloads and runs any executable its domain supplies.

After registering the abandoned domain popcorntimeupd.xyz,...

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