If you've been putting off updating Chrome, now is the time

As reported by BleepingComputer, the search giant has actually fixed two zero-day vulnerabilities and another highly critical flaw According to a security advisory released by Google, the company is aware that an exploit exists for one of these zero-day vulnerabilities (tracked as CVE-2024-0519) and that hackers are currently using it in attacks

This severe zero-day vulnerability is an out-of-bounds memory access vulnerability discovered in Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine by Toan (suto) Pham, a security researcher at Qrious Secure By exploiting this vulnerability, an attacker can access sensitive information or cause a crash [At the same time, this zero-day exploit can be used to bypass Chrome's other protection mechanisms and cascade with other flaws to facilitate code execution

Unfortunately, however, not much is known about how this zero-day is currently being actively exploited by hackers The reason for this is that, as Google often does, they are withholding additional details until the majority of Chrome users have downloaded and installed a fix for this problem

Browser-based attacks have become increasingly prevalent in recent years because we now do most of our work in our web browsers Fortunately, however, we can protect ourselves from attacks by keeping our browsers up-to-date

In Chrome, when updates become available, a color-coded warning system bubbles next to your profile picture: updates older than 2 days are green, updates older than 4 days are orange, and updates older than 1 week are red

If you do not want to wait, you can also check manually to see if a Chrome update is available To do so, click on the three dots menu in the upper right corner of your browser, open Settings, and go to About Chrome If an update is available for installation, Chrome will begin downloading it automatically from this page and will apply it the next time you restart your browser or computer

In addition to keeping your browser up-to-date, you should also use the best antivirus software on your PC, the best Mac antivirus software on your Mac, and the best Android antivirus app on your Android smartphone That way, you can be sure to protect yourself from malware and other modern cyber threats

Zero-day flaws should not be taken for granted, as they are often used in serious attacks However, if you install the latest security updates when they become available, you should be able to safely protect yourself from potential attacks that take advantage of them