Google Chrome ‘most unsafe’ internet browser: Report

The report by Atlas VPN has stated that these figures are based on data from the VulDB vulnerability database, covering January 1, 2022 to October 5, 2022.

As per the report, Google Chrome is the only browser with new vulnerabilities in the five days in October. Recent ones are CVE-202203318, CVE-2022-3314, CVE-2022-3311, CVE-2022-3309 and CVE-2022-3307.

The CVE programme tracks security flaws and vulnerabilities across multiple platforms. The database does not list details for these flaws, but the report said they can lead to memory corruption on a computer.

Users can fix these by updating to Google Chrome version 106.0.5249.61. Reportedly, Mozilla’s Firefox browser is in second place for vulnerabilities with 117 of them.

Microsoft Edge was reported to have 103 vulnerabilities as of October 5, with 61% more than the entire year of 2021. Overall, it had 806 vulnerabilities since its release.

Talking about Safari, it has some of the lowest levels of vulnerabilities in comparison with others. In the first three quarters of 2022, it witnessed 26 vulnerabilities and its number of cumulative vulnerabilities were 1,139 since its release, the report said.

Notably, the Opera browser had no documented vulnerabilities so far in 2022 and only 344 total vulnerabilities.

As of May 2022, Safari has witnessed over a billion users and Apple has been working hard to make sure its browser is secure and safe to use.

To recall, National cyber agency CERT-In had issued a high severity warning for Google Chrome users. In its latest advisory, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team said that some Google Chrome versions on desktop were affected by multiple vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities could be exploited by a remote attacker to bypass security restriction, execute arbitrary code or cause denial or service conditions on the targeted system.

As per CERT-In, Google Chrome versions prior to 106.0.5249.61 for Mac/linux and 106.0.5249.61/62 for Windows were impacted. The advisory dated September 30, 2022 was marked with high severity ranking.