Google has once again updated the Windows, Mac and Linux versions of Chrome 49 in order to patch several vulnerabilities, including high-risk issues for which researchers got paid thousands of dollars.
Chrome 49.0.2623.108 resolves a total of five vulnerabilities, four of which have been identified and reported by external researchers.
Two of the issues, credited to “anonymous,” have been described as high severity use-after-free vulnerabilities in Navigation (CVE-2016-1647) and Extensions (CVE-2016-1648). The researcher or researchers who reported the flaws to Google have been awarded $5,500 and $5,000, respectively.
Another high severity vulnerability is an out-of-bounds read in the V8 JavaScript engine (CVE-2016-1646) for which Wen Xu from Tencent KeenLab earned $7,500.
At the recent Pwn2Own 2016 competition, JungHoon Lee (lokihardt) attempted to demonstrate a code execution exploit against Chrome. The attempt failed, but it appears the researcher identified a high severity buffer overflow in libANGLE (CVE-2016-1649). Google’s advisory credits Lee for finding the flaw, but the amount of money he will get for it has not been determined.
The latest Chrome update also patches multiple vulnerabilities found by Google’s own security team.
When it released Chrome 49 in early March, Google announced patching a total of 26 security issues affecting previous versions. An update released roughly one week later patched an additional three high severity issues.
Last month, an anonymous researcher earned over $25,000 for reporting same-origin bypass and Chrome sandbox escape bugs, and Google is prepared to give out even higher amounts for vulnerabilities found in its products. The company announced recently that it’s prepared to give $100,000 to anyone who can achieve a persistent compromise of a Chromebox or Chromebook in guest mode via a web page.
In addition, the Chrome Reward Program has been expanded to include Safe Browsing download protection bypass vulnerabilities, which are worth up to $1,000.
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
More from Eduard Kovacs
- CISA Warns of Old JBoss RichFaces Vulnerability Being Exploited in Attacks
- NIST Publishes Final Version of 800-82r3 OT Security Guide
- Johnson Controls Hit by Ransomware
- Verisoul Raises $3.25 Million in Seed Funding to Detect Fake Users
- Government Shutdown Could Bench 80% of CISA Staff
- Google Rushes to Patch New Zero-Day Exploited by Spyware Vendor
- macOS 14 Sonoma Patches 60 Vulnerabilities
- New GPU Side-Channel Attack Allows Malicious Websites to Steal Data
Latest News
- Bankrupt IronNet Shuts Down Operations
- AWS Using MadPot Decoy System to Disrupt APTs, Botnets
- Generative AI Startup Nexusflow Raises $10.6 Million
- In Other News: RSA Encryption Attack, Meta AI Privacy, ShinyHunters Hacker Guilty Plea
- Researchers Extract Sounds From Still Images on Smartphone Cameras
- National Security Agency is Starting an Artificial Intelligence Security Center
- CISA Warns of Old JBoss RichFaces Vulnerability Being Exploited in Attacks
- Hackers Set Sights on Apache NiFi Flaw That Exposes Many Organizations to Attacks
