It's been a while since QuickTime was the main subject of the security advisory as the Apple technology managed to dribble the flaws and remain 100 percent safe to use. But today, both Apple and security company Secunia advised the users to update to version 7.3 as the prior versions contain several vulnerabilities. Secunia rated all of them as highly critical, saying that they "can be exploited by malicious people to disclose sensitive information, bypass certain security restrictions, and compromise a user's system." Apple acknowledged the reports and released QuickTime 7.3, the version which is supposed to repair all the discovered holes.

As far as I can see from Apple's security advisory, many glitches affect Mac OS X, starting with 10.3.9 and ending with 10.5 (a.k.a. Leopard), as well as Windows including XP and Vista.

"A memory corruption issue exists in QuickTime's handling of image description atoms. By enticing a user to open a maliciously crafted movie file, an attacker may cause an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue by performing additional validation of QuickTime image descriptions. Credit to Dylan Ashe of Adobe Systems Incorporated for reporting this issue," Apple described one of the vulnerabilities which could allow arbitrary code execution.

There's no secret that Apple's QuickTime is one of the most popular applications in its category so in order to remain 100 percent protected while using it, update it to the latest version. In case you don't know, QuickTime comes as the default multimedia player in Mac OS X, being able to handle all formats of files including video, music and pictures.

As usual, you can download the latest version of QuickTime straight from Softpedia. The Mac OS X version is available here while the Windows flavor is published on this link.