The good news: QuickTime is an effective media unit for the Mac OS X and Windows operating systems that handles a wide variety of formats and makes playback quick and easy.

The bad news: Sometimes they find a security hole in it that makes you wonder why you bought a computer in the first place.

According to MacNN, Italian researcher Luigi Auriemma has stated that the has discovered a buffer overflow problem in QuickTime 7.3.1 allowing malicious code to be executed. The problem apparently surfaces when QuickTime attempts to launch a Real Time Streaming Protocol link and port 554 is closed. The software will then attempt to access port 80 and trigger an error message that causes the buffer overflow.

Apparently both the Windows and Mac OS X version of QuickTime are affected and the existence of the bug has been confirmed by Alfred Huger, vice president of development at Symantec Security Response. Huger, who observed the proof-of-concept code for the bug, stated that he only managed to crash Quicktime, but, "it's a safe assumption that if you can do that you may be able to execute remote code," he says. "It's very serious."

Huger comments that despite a seeming increase in attacks on Apple platforms, hackers do not care about Apple specifically. Instead, Huger says, they are interested in any widely-available platform, which maximizes distribution.

Stay tuned for more information on this as it becomes available and if you've seen a similar instance of this, let us know in the comments or forums.