It’s been quite the week for security warnings impacting vast numbers of users. From 650 million X users advised “don’t change your password,” a fully undetectable backdoor threat to millions of macOS users, to a red alert for those taking security comfort in their password manager. Now the vast majority of the 3.45 billion users of the world’s most popular web browser, Google Chrome, have been warned of security threats requiring an immediate update. Here’s what you need to know and do.
Chrome Security Warning For Android, Linux, Mac And Windows
Google has confirmed that all users of the Chrome web browser across the Android, Linux, Mac And Windows operating systems need to update their client immediately. The security update fixes a total of 12 issues, including three vulnerabilities that were discovered by external researchers and include two that have been allocated a high-severity rating. The vulnerabilities are serious enough that Google is restricting details of them until a majority of Chrome users have followed the advice and ensured their browsers have been properly patched. Google said that it “will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed.”
The Chrome Browser Security Vulnerabilities
The three vulnerabilities that were reported by external security researchers have been identified as follows:
- CVE-2025-0444 is a high-rated vulnerability impacting the Skia browser component.
- CVE-2025-0445 is another high-rated vulnerability but this time impacting Chrome’s V8 javascript rendering engine.
- CVE-2025-0451, meanwhile, is “only” a medium-rated vulnerability and impacts the Extensions API.
All Users Must Update To Chrome 133 Immediately—Here’s How
Although Google rolls out automatic updates for the Chrome browser across platforms, the truth of the matter is that this isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. For a start, those updates are, Google said, due to commence in the coming days and weeks. Not altogether comforting when you consider that high-rated vulnerabilities are at the heart of the security issue triggering the update. Then there’s the small matter that even if the update is rolled out to you, unless you relaunch your browser, closing your tab collection in the process, it won’t actually protect you anyway.
The version numbers that indicate a fix are Chrome 133.0.6943.49 for Android, Chrome 133.0.6943.53 for Linux and Chrome 133.0.6943.53/54 for Mac and Windows. Here’s what you need to do immediately to stay secure from the security vulnerabilities that have been found.
Head for the Google Chrome Help|About option to kickstart an automatic check for any updates and initiate the download process. After the download has been completed, you will need to restart your browser, so save any tabs you have open and hit that button now.
