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Eye Security's header illustration for Operation IXIM, a smiling cartoon popcorn bucket half buried in a sea of popcorn on a purple background.
Image: Eye Security, header illustration for "Operation IXIM: Preventing a botnet of millions of Popcorn Time users," Oct. 22, 2026 (fair use).

Response

Eye Security Says It Quietly Switched Off a Forgotten Popcorn Time Updater on More Than 1 Million PCs and Macs After Finding Millions Still Calling Domains Anyone Could Register

An MSSP threat hunt turned up an abandoned updater that would download and run any file as SYSTEM or root over plain HTTP. Eye registered the lapsed domains, pushed a fix that only disables the service, and handed the domains to Shadowserver. The app itself is still unsafe, and Eye's advice is to remove it.

Noah Park, ResponseNew York6 min read

LUXEMBOURG - Over the winter, a Dutch security company sent software to more than a million computers whose owners had never asked it to. The code did one thing: it switched off a forgotten update service that anyone holding the right domain name could have used to run programs on those machines with full system rights.

Eye Security described the work, which it calls Operation IXIM, in a talk at the hack.lu conference in Luxembourg on Thursday and in a blog post by Niels Teusink the same day. Between November 2025 and March 2026, Eye says, it disabled the update mechanism in Popcorn Time, the Time4Popcorn streaming client that many people installed years ago and forgot. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-30612, which Eye disclosed in June. The Hacker News reports it carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and affects Windows versions up to 6.2.1.18, macOS up to 6.2.1.17 and Android up to 3.5.0.173. Eye notes that a newer, legal project that started using the Popcorn Time name in 2025 is not affected.

A threat hunt, then a flood

The story began with a routine hunt across Eye's managed security clients. A handful had Popcorn Time installed, and its Updater.exe was trying to reach popcorntimeupd[.]xyz, a domain nobody had registered. Eye registered it to see what would arrive.

Eye Security's screenshot of its write-up showing about 50 requests a second arriving at the registered domain, with a sample request: GET /?app_id=T4PSEC&hid=...&ver=6.1.0.0&os=WIN060200.
Screenshot: Eye Security, Operation IXIM write-up, Oct. 22, 2026 (fair use).Each request carried an app ID, a hardware ID, a version and an operating system string.

About 50 requests a second came in. Over six months Eye counted more than 3.8 million distinct hardware IDs, about half from Windows, roughly 45% from macOS and less than 5% from Android. Those counts turned out to be wrong in both directions. On Windows, a reversed error check in the updater meant the machine GUID was usually left out of the ID, and laptops shipped from the same factory image, including hundreds of HP EliteBook and ProBook G9 machines Eye saw in its own EDR telemetry, produced identical IDs. Eye now estimates it encountered about 2.5 million to 3 million Windows hosts. On macOS, address randomization inflated the count; Eye's best guess is 250,000 to 350,000 Macs rather than the 1.7 million it first counted.

What an attacker could have done

Reverse engineering showed how bad the exposure was. The Windows updater, written in C++ with a 2013 release of the Boost library, expected a JSON reply naming an executable. It downloaded that file over plain HTTP and ran it as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM, with no code signing. The macOS version did the same as root. Eye lists 20 updater domains across the three platforms, many of them lapsed, parked or for sale, so whoever held one could push code to every machine that asked it for updates.

Eye Security's kepler.gl map of a sample of the IP addresses that contacted its domains, showing clients on every inhabited continent, densest in Europe and North America.
Image: Eye Security, kepler.gl map of a sample of connecting IP addresses, Oct. 22, 2026 (fair use).

Most clients were home users on consumer ISPs, Eye says, but it also saw connections from corporate, government and military networks around the world.

The fix, and the backlash

Buying every domain was not realistic; some were held by different people or listed for sale for thousands of dollars. After advice from its legal team, Eye chose to answer the update requests itself. It compares the decision to Operation Ladybird, in which Dutch police pushed an update to Emotet-infected machines in 2021, while noting that Popcorn Time users installed the software on purpose.

The update did not remove anything. On Windows it stopped and disabled the service, the equivalent of running sc.exe stop "Update service" and sc.exe config "Update service" start= disabled. On macOS it ran launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/PT.updd.plist.

Eye Security's screenshot of the VirusTotal AI summary that labeled its fix as malware for disabling a Windows service named Update service.
Screenshot: Eye Security, Operation IXIM write-up, Oct. 22, 2026 (fair use).A week after upload, 11 vendors on VirusTotal flagged the fix.

Security products pushed back. A week after someone uploaded the fix to VirusTotal, 11 vendors detected it as malicious. Every block left the vulnerable updater running, Eye says, so rather than file weeks of false-positive reports it reworked the code until only one vendor flagged it.

By December 2025 the fix had reached more than a million systems and update requests had dropped by 90%. By March 1, 2026, Eye was still sending about 5,000 updates a day, a 98% reduction. It stopped at more than 2 million update downloads and in late March transferred the 15 domains it owned to The Shadowserver Foundation for sinkholing. Some domains are still in third-party hands. Eye pushed nothing to Android, where installing an update requires the user to approve it.

The app is still unsafe

Disabling the updater did not make Popcorn Time safe. Eye says the application runs a 2014 Chrome engine with the sandbox turned off, loads content over unencrypted HTTP and pulled JavaScript from abandoned domains, which Eye also registered and handed over. It built a proof of concept that launches calc.exe through that JavaScript path.

What SOC teams should do

  • Hunt for C:\Program Files\Popcorn Time\Updater.exe on Windows and /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/PT.updd on macOS, and remove Popcorn Time where found.
  • Search DNS and proxy logs for the updater domains Eye published, among them popcorntimeupd[.]xyz, time4popcorn[.]info, pctupd[.]info, t4p-upd[.]info and updpopcorntime[.]xyz.
  • Treat any Windows service named "Update service" that you did not install as worth a look, and check whether it is disabled.
  • Eye asks endpoint vendors to classify the Updater.exe and PT.updd hashes as potentially unwanted programs and remove them.
  • Do not rely on hardware IDs built from volume serials or GUIDs to count unique machines; cloned images make them collide.

Sources:


Noah Park covers incident response, containment, and blue-team operations for SOCtember from New York.

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