Author: Brian Barrett / Source: WIRED
This week, Google announced that it had patched a wicked vulnerability in Chrome, by far the most popular browser in the world. Not only that, the search giant also confirmed that hackers had been actively exploiting the bug, in tandem with one found in Windows.
Soon after came a wave of reports imploring people to update Chrome right now. But thanks to Google’s embrace of auto-updating its software, for most people it was already taken care of.Software updates are a pain no matter how you shake it. The MacOS prompts never leave you alone. Automatic Windows 10 updates ask you to restart your PC at the least convenient times. And fresh versions of iOS seem to brick phones every couple of years. You’d be forgiven for wanting to just forget the whole thing.
Don’t! Keeping your software up to date is the easiest way to protect yourself from hackers, and letting it happen automatically is the best way to guarantee that it actually happens. “As a security practitioner, I am a strong advocate for auto-updates, especially when it comes to consumers,” says Jérôme Segura, head of threat intelligence at security firm Malwarebytes.
Take the case of the recent Chrome zero-day vulnerability. Rather than forcing a pop-up on however many millions of open browsers, prompting all of those users to install a patch, which many of them would likely have put off or ignored, Google’s security team just pushed the fix. Done. Well, almost done: In this case, because the attack targets actual Chrome code and not that of a plug-in like Flash, you still have to restart the browser to effect the change. It’s a significantly lower bar, though, and one that’s going to keep substantially more people safe than an elective update would have.
“My impression is that most people don’t want to think about security. It’s more of a burden than anything,” says Josiah Dykstra, technical director at the National Security Agency. “Even if they say they want to be secure, they either don’t have the expertise or the desire to do a lot of work.” Nor should you have to.
There are some clear exceptions here. Plenty of medical and industrial systems can’t apply updates blindly; any…
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