Google on Thursday pushed urgent security fixes for its Chrome browser, including a pair of new security weaknesses that the company said are being exploited in the wild, making them the fourth and fifth actively zero-days plugged this month alone.
The issues, designated as CVE-2021-37975 and CVE-2021-37976, are part of a total of four patches, and concern a use-after-free flaw in V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine as well as an information leak in core.
As is usually the case, the tech giant has refrained from sharing any additional details regarding how these zero-day vulnerabilities were used in attacks until a majority of users are updated with the patches, but noted that it’s aware that “exploits for CVE-2021-37975 and CVE-2021-37976 exist in the wild.”
An anonymous researcher has been credited with reporting CVE-2021-37975. The discovery of CVE-2021-37976, on the other hand, involves Clément Lecigne from Google Threat Analysis Group, who was also credited with CVE-2021-37973, another actively exploited use-after-free vulnerability in Chrome’s Portals API that was reported last week, raising the possibility that the two flaws may have been stringed together as part of an exploit chain to execute arbitrary code.
With the latest update, Google has addressed a record 14 zero-days in the web browser since the start of the year.
Chrome users are advised to update to the latest version (94.0.4606.71) for Windows, Mac, and Linux by heading to Settings > Help > ‘About Google Chrome’ to mitigate any potential risk of active exploitation.