The U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a warning on Thursday to remove Apple’s QuickTime for Windows. The warning was in response to two recently uncovered security flaws in the software that will never be patched in the Windows operating system.
Earlier this year Apple announced an effective end to QuickTime support on Windows operating systems, a decision which still does not have a clear reason. This is specific to Windows machines and means patches, updates, or modifications will no longer be released by Apple for anything other than their iOS computers. Trend Micro, a global leader in IT security, discovered the vulnerabilities and issued details about them stating, “The [vulnerability] allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on installations of QuickTime and the number of users at risk is unknown at this time.”
QuickTime now joins a growing list of deprecated or unsupported software alongside Windows XP and Oracle Java 6 which means users of those systems will become increasingly vulnerable to attacks as time goes on. Apple has not commented on the security flaws but has detailed instructions on how to remove QuickTime from Windows systems and for now, this appears to be the safest option. For other media players providing similar services, Windows Media Player will be on all Windows operating systems and other options such as VLC media player can be found online.
