Old Popcorn Time updater left up to 350,000 Macs open to hijacking, Eye Research says
A leftover update checker from an unofficial Popcorn Time app has been running on hundreds of thousands of Macs, and security researchers say it could have been hijacked to install malware. MacRumors reported the findings on October 29, based on research from the security firm Eye Research.
The software is Time4Popcorn, an unofficial fork distributed under the Popcorn Time name. According to Eye Research, its updater runs in the background on macOS as a launch daemon, so it starts with the Mac even if the user has not opened the app in years. It checks for updates over unencrypted HTTP and can download and run programs with root privileges on the Mac, the researchers say.