Two New Chrome 0-Days Under Active Attacks – Update Your Browser

Google has patched two more zero-day flaws in the Chrome web browser for desktop, making it the fourth and fifth actively exploited vulnerabilities addressed by the search giant in recent weeks.

The company released 86.0.4240.198 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which it said will be rolling out over the coming days/weeks to all users.

Tracked as CVE-2020-16013 and CVE-2020-16017, the flaws were discovered and reported to Google by “anonymous” sources, unlike previous cases, which were uncovered by the company’s Project Zero elite security team.

Google acknowledged that exploits for both the vulnerabilities exist in the wild but stopped short of sharing more specifics to allow a majority of users to install the fixes.

According to the release notes, the two flaws are:

• CVE-2020-16013: An “inappropriate implementation” of its V8 JavaScript rendering engine was reported on November 9.
• CVE-2020-16017: An use-after-free memory corruption issue in Chrome’s site isolation feature was reported on November 7.

It’s worth noting that the zero-day it patched last week, CVE-2020-16009, also concerned an inappropriate implementation of V8, leading to remote code execution. It’s not immediately clear if the two flaws are related.

Over the last week, Google disclosed a number of actively exploited zero-day flaws targeting Chrome, Windows, and Apple’s iOS and macOS, and while it appears that some of these issues were strung together to form an exploit chain, the company is yet to reveal key details about who may have been using them and who were the intended targets.

It’s advised that users update their devices to the latest Chrome version to mitigate the risk associated with the two flaws.