AOL's Winamp patched for flaws

The latest addition to the growing list of vulnerable applications is AOL's Winamp multimedia player, developed by Nullsoft.

On 10 January, Nullsoft released version 5.08 of the Winamp player. Although not a significant update, it did address a number of security holes in the program.

It didn't take long however for more flaws to rear their heads and just a few days ago another update was released, 5.08c, with little fanfare. Specifically, flaws were present in the dynamic link libraries, or DLLs, of the program responsible for handling MPEG 4 encoding and decoding.

Of note, the last four updates of the program, 5.05, 5.06, 5.07 and 5.08 have all been primarily security updates.

Despite this, and the fact that none of the original Winamp development team remains, including the program's creator, Justin Frankel, Winamp is still the multimedia player of choice for many users, and has been for almost a decade.

It began in 1997 as a basic MP3 player, but quickly became capable of playing audio files of a majority of popular formats, as well as video compressed using the MPEG 2 and MPEG 4 codecs.