I have been following Dick Eastman for a fairly long time (over 15 years or so) and I saw his post on Using a Chromebox as My Primary Day-to-day Computer on his Privacy Blog. It was a very good article with one exception and here is what Dick Eastman got wrong. In his post, he made the following comment:

“Next, Chromebooks and Chromeboxes never get viruses. They are safe and very secure for use anywhere online.”

When I read that, I was very surprised. It is true that Chromeboxes cannot get Windows viruses, its absolutely not true that they are very secure for anywhere on the internet. Malwarebytes Labs has a great, easy to read, article about this on their site Yes, Chromebooks can and do get infected.

One of the newer types of malware for computers (over the past couple of years) is Fileless Malware. This type of malware doesn’t install itself anywhere, there are no exe’s to install. It runs within the browser environment. Chromebooks/boxes are susceptible to this type of an attack.

No matter what type of computing environment that you use (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome), always lead with security in mind first.  Its a computer, it CAN be hacked. There is nothing on this world that isn’t hackable, given time, money and resources.