Apple has reversed course and patched a bug in its Safari browser after security researchers showed how it could be used to run unauthorized software on a Windows machine. The "carpet bomb" bug , which was originally discovered by security researcher Nitesh Dhanjani, was initially thought to be less serious than it turned out to be.
Dhanjani showed how Safari could be misused to litter a victim"s desktop with downloaded programs, but two weeks after he disclosed his research, another hacker, named Aviv Raff, showed that this flaw could be exploited in tandem with other problems in Windows and Internet Explorer to run unauthorized software on a victim"s PC. That prompted Microsoft to issue its own warning about the issue. It also caused some security experts to caution Web surfers about using Safari on the Windows platform.