SecurityZone.org - Information Security Blog

Have you heard about the new Google Chrome browser lately? Chances are high that you have. However, are you or anyone you know actually using the browser? My guess is there’s a good chance the answer is NO. Sure, it’s just a beta version, but it’s been getting all kinds of hype.. seemingly out of no where. In fact I haven’t used it and don’t plan on even trying it out for some time. Why? Well, for starters I haven’t seen a real compelling reason to use it yet. Couple that with the horrendous privacy issues that have been raised and you’ve got a potential (as the article puts it) security nightmate. Oh did I mention there’s already been multiple public proof of concept exploits that can possibly result in a remote compromise?

It looks like Google Chrome is a pretty risky proposition right now. Yes, it is beta but some of these items are a bit alarming. I am not one of the people that calls Google evil, but I try not to let them near my data whenever possible. Using this browser definitely won’t further that cause. It is still a bit early with a few early adopters(testers), so we might see a lot of fixes and improvements across the board before its final release. I’ll post my two cents at a later date for anyone that might care.

I did a quick check and I can see that at least two visitors of the blog are trying out Google Chrome. Hopefully I’m not scaring anyone away from testing the browser, that certainly isn’t my intent. However, I just want people to know about the potential risks to privacy and security that presently exist. All browsers have security issues, however, that doesn’t mean we should ignore them. If you have any comments on this issue or the browser, feel free to submit them and I will post them.

In case there’s any interest, the Google Chrome User-Agent looks like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13