Chrome security patch issued

A critical security issue in Google Chrome has been spotted and fixed according to engineers working on the browser.

The vulnerability would have let hackers remotely take control of computers if exploited.

Google said that more details about the flaw would be made public once the majority of Chrome users have patched their browsers with the fix.

The latest release from Google Chrome, version 2.0.172.33, fixes the issue of a "buffer overflow" attack, Google said on the Chrome blog.

Google Chrome: first look

Chrome engineers described the fix as critical, saying that "an attacker might be able to run code with the privileges of the logged on user," if the hacker was successful.

The patch also addresses the browser crashing when loading some websites, although Chrome did not list which ones. The vulnerability was spotted by the Google Chrome security team.

The patch will be automatically downloaded and applied when you next restart the browser.