An emergency Chrome update that Google announced on Thanksgiving Day addresses an actively exploited zero-day in the popular browser.
Tracked as CVE-2022-4135, the high-severity vulnerability is described as a heap buffer overflow in Chrome’s GPU component.
“Google is aware that an exploit for CVE-2022-4135 exists in the wild,” the internet giant notes.
A National Vulnerability Database advisory explains that the security defect could allow “a remote attacker who had compromised the renderer process to potentially perform a sandbox escape via a crafted HTML page.”
Typically leading to crashes, heap-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities could be exploited to cause denial-of-service (DoS) conditions, by putting the program in an infinite loop.
Attackers could also exploit buffer overflows to execute arbitrary code or bypass existing protection mechanisms.
Clement Lecigne of Google’s Threat Analysis Group has been credited for reporting the security flaw on November 22. The patch was announced two days later.
However, the internet giant has not shared further details on the bug and the observed exploitation attempts, pointing out that information may be published after most users have installed the available patches.
The latest Chrome update is now rolling out as version 107.0.5304.121 for Mac and Linux and as version 107.0.5304.121/.122 for Windows.
CVE-2022-4135 is the eighth Chrome zero-day to be resolved this year. Google rushed two other Chrome emergency updates in October and September, to resolve two under-attack zero-days.
Two other zero-day flaws were resolved in August and July. The exploitation of the July vulnerability was linked to Israeli spyware company Candiru.
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