Dive into OS X

Apple released the 3.0 beta on Monday, and hackers started digging up bugs within hours.

The Safari 3.0.1 update, released early Thursday morning, fixes three bugs in the Windows beta browser, including bugs that were discovered earlier this week by researchers Thor Larholm and Aviv Raff. According to Apple, two of the three bugs don’t affect the Safari 3.0 beta that runs on Mac OS x, but the third can also crash the Mac browser.

Apple describes the bugs being patched as follow:

The updated version patches CVE-2007-3186, a command-injection vulnerability that may lead to arbitrary code execution; CVE-2007-3185, an out-of-bounds memory read issue that may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution; and CVE-2007-2391, a race condition that may allow cross-site scripting.

The updates come just four days after the company released a beta version of Safari for Windows at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. This quick update is remarkable because Apple managed to fix some serious security vulnerabilities in a very short time frame. Their usual response time is mostly counted in weeks or months. This indicates that Apple is serious about being an important browser contender for Windows users.

This is the first time that Apple has released a version of Safari for the Windows platform. Because it now can be run on a much larger number of systems, the code has been getting more attention from the security community.

Security analysts expect to see several more updates from Apple in the coming weeks.