On November 22, 2022, Google released an emergency patch for a high severity vulnerability in all unpatched versions of its Chrome web browser. This was the 8th vulnerability of its kind this year, and it was confirmed by Google's Threat Analysis group that researchers have observed this exploit being actively used by attackers in the wild.
The vulnerability is a type of buffer overflow that could result in memory corruption, software crashes, and even the leak of sensitive information through arbitrary code execution. Given the severity of the vulnerability (designated as CVE-2022-4135) and the widespread popularity of Chrome, it is likely that more sophisticated threat actors will try to exploit this vulnerability in the coming weeks.
An article from BleepingComputer confirms that North Korean hackers have been exploiting this zero-day vulnerability for over a month before Google had released an official patch. Over 250 individuals, all working for 10 different news media, domain registrars, web hosting providers, and software vendors have been targeted, where Google discovered victims were being targeted with “links spoofing legitimate job hunting websites like Indeed and ZipRecruiter… adding that clicking on them would serve victims a hidden iframe that triggered the exploit kit”.
Protecting your Chrome:
Fortunately, as of January 10, Google has released an update patching 17 vulnerabilities, including this zero-day exploit. Ensure your Google Chrome experience is kept safe by doing the following:
- Go to Settings > 'About Chrome', wait for the download of the latest version to finish,
- Restart the program and verify that the Chrome version is 109.0.5414.75 or newer.
- If your browser constantly has multiple tabs open and you rarely restart the browser, make sure it fully closed then re-opened to ensure your Chrome is protected.
