Eye Security's research team said on 22 October 2026 that between November 2025 and March 2026 it actively disabled the vulnerable update mechanism in Time4Popcorn, a fork of the Popcorn Time BitTorrent streaming client, by executing code on systems running it. The flaw is CVE-2026-30612, which the CVE record describes as allowing a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code through updater.exe on Windows and PT.updd on macOS in Time4Popcorn for Windows up to 6.2.1.18, for macOS up to 6.2.1.17 and for Android up to 3.5.0.173; CISA's ADP enrichment scores it CVSS 3.1 9.8.

Eye Security says it found an Updater.exe at a client trying to reach the lapsed domain popcorntimeupd.xyz. After registering it, Eye found the updater would download and run any executable named in a JSON reply with NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM privileges, with no code signing and over unencrypted HTTP; on macOS a pushed update ran as root. It estimates it encountered about 2.5 to 3.0 million Windows hosts and 250,000 to 350,000 macOS hosts, connecting mostly from home ISPs but also from government, military and corporate networks around the world.

Eye says its update only stopped and disabled the updater service, with no telemetry or file deletion, and that it had to adjust the code to get past endpoint products that flagged it.

It says more than a million systems were updated by December 2025, it sent over 2 million update downloads in total, and update requests had fallen 98% by 1 March 2026. In late March it handed the 15 domains it controlled to The Shadowserver Foundation; some other update domains are still owned by third parties.

Eye did not touch Android, where updates need user interaction, and says the application itself remains unsafe: it is built on a 2014 Chrome engine with the sandbox disabled, loads content over plain HTTP and loaded JavaScript from abandoned domains, and Eye has a proof of concept that runs calc.exe through JavaScript. Primary: Eye Security.

Updated 23 Oct 2026: BleepingComputer reported the research. (source: BleepingComputer)