Security News

Google late Thursday night shipped an emergency patch to close a Chrome browser vulnerability that was being used in mysterious zero-day attacks. The Google Chrome patch, which is being pushed via the browser's automatic self-patching, covers a critical vulnerability in V8, Google's JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.

Google, whose Project Zero bug-hunting team is often surprisingly vocal when describing and discussing software vulnerabilities, has taken a very quiet approach to a just-patched bug in its Chrome browser. The phrase "Exploit exists in the wild" is shorthand for "The crooks found this vulnerability before we did and are already using it in real-life attacks".

The heap-buffer overflow error exists in V8, an open-source WebAssembly and JavaScript engine developed by the Chromium Project for Google Chrome and Chromium web browsers. Researchers urge Google Chrome users to update as soon as possible.

If you use Google Chrome or a Chromium-based browser such as Microsoft Edge, update it immediately and/or check it for updates over the coming days: there is a zero-day bug being "Actively exploited" in the older version of Chrome that will also affect other vendors' browsers. Details are intentionally scant until enough of the wider world has installed the update, but the flaw exists in how Chrome handles heap overflows in V8, Chromium's Javascript engine.

Google has addressed an actively exploited zero-day security vulnerability in the Chrome 88.0.4324.150 version released today, February 4th, 2020, to the Stable desktop channel for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. "Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2021-21148 exists in the wild," the Google Chrome 88.0.4324.150 announcement reads.

An Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability has been discovered used in recent North Korean attacks against security and vulnerability researchers. Last month, Google disclosed that the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group known as Lazarus was conducting social engineering attacks against security researchers.

SonicWall on Wednesday announced that it released firmware updates for its Secure Mobile Access 100 series appliances to patch an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability. Which specializes in firewalls and other cybersecurity solutions, previously told SecurityWeek that a few thousand devices are exposed to attacks due to the vulnerability.

"A few thousand devices are impacted," SonicWall said in a statement, adding, "SMA 100 firmware prior to 10.x is unaffected by this zero-day vulnerability." On January 22, The Hacker News exclusively revealed that SonicWall had been breached as a consequence of a coordinated attack on its internal systems by exploiting "Probable zero-day vulnerabilities" in its SMA 100 series remote access devices.

SonicWall has released a patch for the zero-day vulnerability used in attacks against the SMA 100 series of remote access appliances. On January 22nd, SonicWall disclosed that their internal systems were attacked using a zero-day vulnerability in the SMA 100 series of SonicWall networking devices.

To limit the impact of zero-day vulnerabilities, Google security researcher Maddie Stone would like those developing software fixes to stop delivering shoddy patches. "Looking at them all together as a group, the number that stuck out the most to me was that six out of the 24 zero-days exploited in 2020 are variants of previously disclosed vulnerabilities," she said.