A Trojan has been detected in some variants of Popcorn Time, a program intended for streaming, which, as it is discontinued and is open source, has a large number of variants.
If you have been informed about free software for a long time, you will remember a software called Popcorn Time, which was a streaming multimedia player that, using BitTorrent, was capable of transmit by Streaming movies, television programs ... Well today, many clones of this client have appeared, which are being used as malware.
As the source code for Popcorn Time is free, many people are making copies of the program now. include potentially dangerous programs within the sameor. For example, it has been reported in reddit that a potentially dangerous Trojan has been detected in some versions of this program, which was installed when running the program's installer.
Fortunately, the detected virus mainly affects Windows operating systems, however, this makes you think a bit and makes you think that free software not only has positive things, it also has negative things.
The peculiarity of open source programs is that anyone can modify it to your liking and add and remove things as you see fit. This enriches the free software community, but from time to time malicious people sneak into the community.
In the case of Popcorn Time, they have taken advantage of a great idea (the original project was discontinued years ago, due to complaints from the film industry) to include a Trojan, thanks to which the victim's computer can be controlled at will.
For all this, you should be careful what you download and find out whether the version of Popcorn Time or any other program is trustworthy, since it could be a malware program. To check it, you can use the website VirusTotal, which analyzes files and web pages suspected of being malware for free.
If you would like to install PopCorn Time safely, follow the steps in the tutorial that we just left you.
I was going to write an article on the subject, the malware called "Update.exe" is located in the same popcorntime installation folder, it is easy to remove, you just stop its service and go and delete it.
and do you have access to the source code of the exe that infects the computers? because if not, is it really free software as mentioned here? Or are we facing a case in which source code software was packaged with unopened / free malware, right?
I think that you are creating confusion for readers with the images with which you open this article, as I read in the reddit report that you link, they correspond to a site classified as safe (Popcorntime.ag Is Safe). You could be suggesting that said website distributes popcorn time binaries with malware or viruses when it is not. Also inaccurate is your claim that the popcorn time project closed years ago, this project closed just last year and different copies have been popping up ever since.
Greetings.
LXA people do not understand how they continue to let Azpe publish, we go from his mediocre articles on Archlinux, and now this tabloid entry. Hopefully they will do something about it, their editorial line is very good, but letting people like this write on their blog, instead of gaining readers - I consider - they will lose them, really a shame.
In fact, all of a sudden, popcorntime screens started to appear without even installing it, and it actually behaves like a virus. I don't know how it got to my pc, but it interrupted my work. It is a kind of VIRUS.
Eset stops me continuously. It is a file encryptor. I had to have it analyzed. As I have read it is a ransomware. I am trying to eliminate it.
To those who say that it is not a virus, I already say yes. I have had many problems.