Chrome 96 Update Patches Exploited Zero-Day Vulnerability

Google on Monday announced a Chrome 96 update that patches five vulnerabilities, including a zero-day that has been exploited in attacks.

The most severe of these vulnerabilities can be exploited to execute arbitrary code in the context of the browser.

The security defect that has already been exploited in attacks is tracked as CVE-2021-4102 and it has been rated ‘high severity.’ Described as a use-after-free issue in the V8 JavaScript engine, the bug was reported to Google on December 9 by an anonymous researcher.

“Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2021-4102 exists in the wild,” the Internet search giant says in an advisory.

The most severe of the newly addressed bugs is CVE-2021-4098, which carries a severity rating of ‘critical’ and is described as insufficient data validation in Mojo.

The remaining three vulnerabilities that Google also patched with the new browser refresh are considered high-severity flaws.

These include a use-after-free in Swiftshader (CVE-2021-4099), an object lifecycle issue in ANGLE (CVE-2021-4100), and a heap buffer overflow in Swiftshader (CVE-2021-4101).

Google says that CVE-2021-4099 and CVE-2021-4100 qualify for $5,000 bug bounty rewards each, but has yet to disclose the bounty payouts for CVE-2021-4101 and CVE-2021-4102.

The latest Chrome iteration is now rolling out to Windows, Mac and Linux users as version 96.0.4664.110. The extended stable channel has been updated to this version as well.

Data reviewed by SecurityWeek shows that, so far in 2021, there have been 18 documented zero-day vulnerabilities affecting Google’s Chrome and Android platforms.

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