In a bid to discourage hackers from attacking machines and running their own code on attacked machines, RealNetworks has released a security patch for its media player.
However, the company claims that so far there have been no reports of any ‘machines compromised as a result of the now-remedied vulnerabilities’. “RealNetworks takes all security vulnerabilities very seriously,” a company statement said.
Earlier, security research company Secunia had classified the flaw, which affects latest versions of RealNetworks’ Real Player software on Windows and Macintosh machines, as ‘highly critical’.
The security flaw, which falls under buffer overflow flaws, is used by hackers to flood a program with data and use the resultant data torrent to run their own codes on the victim’s machine. Such programs are common and have earlier been found in some Microsoft programs, Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox Web browser, and Apple Computer's iSync program. Over time, security patches were released for all these programs.
The problem is considered so serious that Microsoft was directed by the European Commission to release a European version of Windows XP minus the Window Media Player console to ward off similar problems.
Recently, Microsoft also patched up the security flaws in its own Windows Media Player.
