Kaspersky says Google Chromebook security is better, and worse

SECURITY CONSULTANCY Kaspersky Lab shot down claims Google has made about the security of its Chromebook, such as it "doesn't need virus protection".

Kaspersky expert Costin Raiu said the statement came at a pretty bad time, with French security firm Vupen announcing this week that it broke into Google Chrome's security protection.

You would imagine criminals would quickly get busy on the Chromebook, trying to find ways of infecting it using a similar type of exploit, which would simply need a user to browse a booby-trapped web page.

However, Raiu said that the Chrome OS is designed in such a way that it has a good self healing capacity, is easy to update, and is resilient against any outside modification. Reinstallation also won't be a problem, as none of the data is held on the computer.

He said, "It's a new operating system, it has new security defenses into place (self healing, updates) and it's used in a different way - the data is not on the computer but in the cloud."

But of course, hackers could go for the information Google has in the cloud. As Sony found to its cost, any leak would could be disastrous.

"With Cloud centric OS'es, the race will be towards stealing access credentials, after which, it's 'game over'," Raiu said.

"Who needs to steal banking accounts, when you have Google Checkout? Or, who needs to monitor passwords, when they're all nicely stored into the Google Dashboard?" µ