Apple (finally) fixes year-old QuickTime flaw

The flaw, which allows malicious manipulation of QuickTime Media Link (.qtl) files, is described by apple as a "command injection issue" in the way the media player handles URLs.

"By enticing a user to open a specially crafted file, an attacker may cause an application to be launched with controlled command line arguments, which may lead to arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue through improved handling of URLs," Apple said in an advisory released today.

This bug does not affect Mac OS X systems.

[ SEE: Unpatched QuickTime-to-Firefox flaw dings IE too ]

This is Apple's second attempt at fixing this vulnerability. Earlier this year, after it was discussed in the Month of Apple Bugs project (MOAB #3), Apple shipped QuickTime 7.1.5 with a fix that turned out to be inadequate.

Earlier this month, security researches Petko D. Petkov and Aviv Raff published proof-of-concept exploits to show that QuickTime still had a major protocol handling problem.

Six days after the release of Petkov's proof-of-concept, which affected users of Firefox, Mozilla shipped a new version of its flagship browser to block code execution attacks from QuickTime.