The Invisible Hijack: Inside the Massive ‘Popa’ Botnet Fueling the Global AI Scraping Economy
For the past four years, a digital shadow has loomed over millions of living rooms worldwide. A sprawling, Android-based botnet known as Popa has quietly commandeered consumer TV streaming boxes, transforming them into relay points for massive, global-scale data scraping, advertising fraud, and unauthorized account access. This week, a multi-firm investigation—involving researchers from Qurium, Synthient,…