Google Chrome 5.0.375.70 Plugs 11 Security Holes

The latest stable release of Google’s open source browser is a must for all users, as it brings to the table almost a dozen patches. Google Chrome 5.0.375.70 is designed to plug a total of 11 security holes impacting the previous version that was released through the Stable channel. Chrome 5.0.375.70 can be downloaded by Windows, Linux and Mac OS X users as of June 8th, and customers running Google’s browser should not hesitate in the least to patch the vulnerabilities affecting the earlier variants of Chrome.

According to Anthony Laforge, Google Chrome Team, no less than nine of the security vulnerabilities resolved with the advent of Chrome 5.0.375.70 carry a severity rating of High. The remaining two are considered to pose only a Medium risk to customers. A couple of security researchers received cash from Google for the vulnerabilities they reported, per the search giant’s financial incentive program for those that report software flaws in Chrome.

The discovery of a vulnerability involving cross-origin bypass in DOM methods was rewarded with $2,000 by Google, while another, related to a memory error in table layout, brought the researcher $500. Of course, the 11 vulnerabilities patched by Google in Chrome 5.0.375.70 don’t even come close to the massive number of flaws resolved by Apple in the latest Stable version of its own browser, Safari 5. With the release of Safari 5, Apple patched no less than 48 vulnerabilities affecting the browser.

At the end of the past week, Google released a new version of Chrome through the Dev channel, introducing support for WebM. “The Google Chrome Dev channel is now up to 6.0.422.0. It includes a bunch of new features to think about when developing your apps: desktop notifications (new since our last developer update); file API and FileReader API: Drag and drop files from the desktop to the browser; native Client (NaCl) SDK and ports: Run with --enable-nacl; HTML5 sandbox attribute; integrated Flash Player plugin: Run dev channel with --enable-internal-flash,” Eric Bidelman, Google Chrome Developer Relations, revealed.

Google Chrome 5.0.375.70 Stable is available for download here.