Severity: High
10 June, 2008
Summary:
- This vulnerability affects: Quicktime 7.4.5 for Mac and PC (and possibly earlier versions)
- How an attacker exploits it: By enticing your users to download and play a malicious multimedia file in Quicktime
- Impact: Attacker executes code on your user’s computer, potentially gaining complete control of it
- What to do: If you allow Quicktime (or iTunes), upgrade to version 7.5; otherwise, remove these applications from your company’s computers
Exposure:
Today, Apple released an alert fixing five vulnerabilities in its popular media player application, Quicktime. (Current versions of iTunes ship with the program as well; if your users have iTunes, they most likely have Quicktime.) These applications run on Windows and Macintosh computers, and both platforms are susceptible to exploitation of these security flaws. Apple’s alert specifies Vista and XP SP2 as the vulnerable versions of Windows.
The vulnerabilities relate to different processes in Quicktime (for example, how it opens picture files, how it displays movie files, how it handles audio files, and so on); but the flaws share a similar result if successfully exploited. If an attacker can get one of your users to open a specially crafted multimedia file, or to click a URL that links to malicious QuickTime content, he could trigger any of these flaws to execute code on your user’s computer, with the same privileges and permissions your user has. If your users have local administrative privileges, the attacker could gain complete control of their machines.
The primary difference between these flaws involves which multimedia file the attacker can use to exploit them. The potentially dangerous files that could trigger these flaws are:
- PICT images (.pict)
- AAC audio files (.aac)
- Indeo video files (.mov, .avi, etc…)
