Apple's Windows browser swarming with bugs

Safari so good for hackers - and the MacOS version is vulnerable too, says expert

Just a day after Apple made a lot of noise about the arrival of its Safari browser for Windows, reports of security bugs are coming thick and fast.

Product testing and security outfit Errata Security managed to find six in the first day of release - though it is only beta code.

Errata's security expert, David Maynor, says the vulnerablities are also in the Mac OSX version. He believes Apple's operating system lacks advanced security and is more open to attack than Microsoft's Vista.

Thor Larholm, a well-known Danish researcher, managed to unearth one of the most dangerous flaws, a remote execution vulnerability accompanied by proof-of-concept exploit code that could be used to hijack a Windows PC. It took him just two hours to find the security bug.

He blamed the flaw partly on Apple’s inexperience with writing Windows code.

“On the OS X platform Apple has enjoyed the same luxury and the same curse as Internet Explorer has had on the Windows platform, namely intimate operating system knowledge,” he explained. “The integration with the originally intended operating system is tightly defined, but the breadth of knowledge is crippled when the software is released on other systems and mistakes and mishaps occur.”

Find out more about Larholm’s discovery here. Apple has not yet commented on the situation.