14 DAY TRIAL // Following the discovery of two security bugs in QuickTime for Windows, today Apple has decided to pull the plug on the application altogether.
Back in November, Trend Micro's Zero-Day Initiative (ZDI) discovered two high impact vulnerabilities in Apple's multimedia toolkit for Windows.
The issues (ZDI-16-241 and ZDI-16-242) are two heap corruption vulnerabilities that allow attackers to run malicious code on the user's machine, after the user opens a maliciously crafted multimedia file, either in the QuickTime desktop client or via the browser plugin.
Apple got tired of fixing security bugs
After making their discoveries, following normal procedures, Trend Micro researchers informed Apple of the issue on November 11 and then waited for the company to plug the security holes.
The researchers had to wait until January 2016, when Apple updated QuickTime for Windows to version 7.7.9. To their surprise, the vulnerabilities weren't patched, and Trend Micro made inquiries at Apple to find out why this didn't happen.
Now Apple has rage quit on the software altogether and decided to deprecate the Windows version of QuickTime for good. As so, today, together with Trend Micro and US-CERT, the three have put out simultaneous announcements, letting Windows users know that they have to uninstall QuickTime.
Trend Micro's vulnerabilities were never patched
Apple says that it will no longer provide updates or security patches and that Trend Micro's vulnerabilities won't be fixed. QuickTime will continue to be updated for Mac users.
The company justified its decision by saying that QuickTime for Windows was no longer needed as a dependency for iTunes on Windows and that modern-day HTML5 multimedia playback via HTML5 is much more adequate compared to QuickTime's browser plugin.
Even if most users rarely used the software nowadays, Apple doesn't recommend even leaving it on their computer, since it may be used as an attack vector by malware.
Removing QuickTime for Windows is recommended for all users who still have it on their computers. Uninstalling QuickTime for Windows will also remove the browser plugin.