If you’re one of Google Chrome’s two billion desktop users, then the urgent warning that has just been issued is for you—and this one you need to take seriously...
Urgwnt Chrome fix has suddenly been released—update your browser now
Google has suddenly patched another serious zero-day vulnerability in its Chrome browser, updating its Stable channel to 124.0.6367.201.
The urgent release addresses a single security vulnerability—a use after free memory issue; this is where latent pointers to vacated memory addresses are not properly wiped clean, and can provide threat actors with an opportunity to execute unexpected code or destabilize a system. The fix is fairly simple, but they crop up repeatedly.
The reason this particular update is urgent is that Google warns it is “aware that an exploit for CVE-2024-4671 exists in the wild.” The high-severity flaw was reported to Google just a few days ago by an anonymous researcher.
As ever, no further details are being made public at this stage.
The urgency with which Google has responded to this suggests they have information strongly suggesting the vulnerability is being actively exploited, not just that there is an exploit that has been seen in the wild.
As such, users should update their browsers as soon as possible—where this is done automatically, you should check version numbers to ensure it has installed correctly.
Instructions on how to update Chrome can be found here.
These are interesting times for Chrome, with its own forays into AI picking up pace, just as OpenAI appears ready to launch a competitor to Google’s core search platform as soon as Monday. If Chrome is the shop window, then search is the engine room behind Google’s money-making machine.
The world’s most popular browser has also come under recent fire for delaying once again the killing of the tracking cookies underpinning its advertising platform. This is down to the ongoing back and further with regulators on the competitive fairness of what will replace these, but for users the net result is the same—tracking continues.
While the AI and tracking stories will run and run, this latest security fix needs to be over and done; the time of highest risk for users is now—when a vulnerability has been fixed and acknowledged, but users have yet to receive or apply that fix. The clock is ticking, as anyone using the exploit knows—their own urgency picks up.
All of which means you should apply this update as soon as it’s available to you.
