​Google has released a security update for the Chrome browser to fix the fifth zero-day vulnerability exploited in the wild since the start of the year.

The high-severity issue tracked as CVE-2024-4671 is a “use after free” vulnerability in the Visuals component that handles the rendering and display of content on the browser.

Google revealed that the vulnerability, discovered and reported by an anonymous researcher, was exploited in attacks.

 

“Google is aware that an exploit for CVE-2024-4671 exists in the wild,” reads the advisory, without providing additional information.

Use after-free flaws are security flaws that occur when a program continues to use a pointer after the memory it points to has been freed, following the completion of its legitimate operations on that region.

Because the freed memory could now contain different data or be used by other software or components, accessing it could result in data leakage, code execution, or crash.

Google addressed the problem with the release of 124.0.6367.201/.202 for Mac/Windows and 124.0.6367.201 for Linux, with the updates rolling out over the coming days/weeks.

 

For users of the ‘Extended Stable’ channel, fixes will be made available in version 124.0.6367.201 for Mac and Windows, also to roll out later.

Chrome updates automatically when a security update is available, but users can confirm they’re running the latest version by going to Settings > About Chrome, letting the update finish, and then clicking on the ‘Relaunch’ button to apply it.