It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

From The Verge:

Remember Popcorn Time, the app that served as an easy-to-use front end for streaming torrents of movies and TV shows? Development of the MPAA’s least-favorite app of the 2010s has been abandoned for years, but the “Netflix of Piracy” software is still installed on millions of devices that are just waiting to join a bot army. Researchers at Eye Security found the updater for a Popcorn Time fork called “Time4Popcorn” still running on tons of Windows, macOS, and Android devices located around the world, phoning home to now-abandoned web domains over unencrypted HTTP and running an outdated, insecure version of Chrome. […]

Eye Security’s Niels Teusink says the updater could have been used to install and run basically any kind of software with full privileges, easily enabling someone to create a botnet just by taking over one of the domains, using a man-in-the-middle attack to target specific devices, or perform surveillance by identifying the machines running the software.

One security company took it upon themselves to prevent that from happening, but the way to do it was to… trick the apps into… updating themselves to death.

(A more detailed information can be found on Eye Security’s website. It’s not the same story, but it reminded me of another creative way to solve a widespread problem that we talked about.)