Many within the tech industry have said for some time that there are numerous security flaws in all kinds of popular and widely-used programs that could pose significant security problems, and one could be particularly problematic.
Security expert Bogdan Botezatu, a senior e-threat analyst at the antivirus firm Bitdefender, recently said that as many as 100 million personal computers around the world are currently vulnerable to hacker attacks as a result of a newly-discovered defect with the popular program Java, according to a report from PC World. This is likely because Oracle, the company that releases Java, no longer has full control over its code, and therefore more security flaws are coming to light.
The only thing to fix this issue, he added, is to completely rewrite Java from the ground up, the report said.
"Oracle needs to take some core components of Java and write them from scratch," he told the site. "These products have become so large and have been developed by so many programmers that the makers have most probably lost control over what's in the product."
The most recent Java vulnerability discovered came as a result of a patch released in October 2012, the report said. However, while many security experts have criticized the usefulness the program serves at this point and more security flaws are now becoming apparent, Botezatu further said that his recommendation that Oracle rewrite the code is unlikely to actually be followed. This is largely because the many Java-based applications that are already available to consumers might no longer work with any new code the company introduces, and that could cause more problems.
However, Oracle may be starting to get out in front of these concerns in one way: More regular releases, the report said. Beginning with the release of Java 8 later this year, each new version will be slated for release every two years.
In the meantime, as a means of addressing the security issues that currently exist, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently suggested that users go into their browsers' settings and shutoff Java altogether, the report said.
Ondrej Krehel, the chief information security officer for IDentity Theft 911, writes regularly about the ways in which consumers can protect themselves from hacking attacks and other security concerns when browsing the Internet.