Update: Secunia Half Year Report 2010 & QuickTime Hell

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In a previous article, entitled "Desperate Propaganda..." I had a rant-fest regarding a PC World FUD-fest regarding Apple security. The author, Preston Gralla, managed to spew out this line of deceit:

:-Q****** "The security company Secunia reports that Apple products have more vulnerabilities than those of any other company."

This was clearly taken as a hit at all Apple products. What was missing was any reference to the context of the source Secunia report, which you can read HERE. I knew better, having been an avid Secunia reader since 2005. In fact, the only Apple products noted in the report were QuickTime and iTunes on Microsoft Windows. Secunia didn't cover any other Apple products.

When I read through the entire Secunia Report I found nothing of relevance to Mac OS X except the fact that the Apple apps discussed are prone to the same problems on Mac OS X as well as Windows.

QuickTime Hell

In previous articles I've covered the major problems with QuickTime, the biggest culprit of Apple security holes. It is used in iTunes, thus making iTunes just as vulnerable. In summary, QuickTime stumbles over malicious ECMAScript (aka 'JavaScript') and coding errors that allow malicious buffer overflows.

Supposedly Apple has been overhauling QuickTime. The first peak at it has been QuickTime Player X. But as far as any user can tell, the QuickTime X project is stalled at version 1.0.0. What we have on Snow Leopard is entirely inadequate, incomplete and buggy. Serious QuickTime users are required to also install QuickTime version 7, the current version of which is 7.6.6.

Hopefully Apple will get back to work on revising QuickTime now that iOS 4 has been completed and released.
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