1 One of the most important things you can do to stay safe from hackers online is to install the latest patches as soon as they become available to keep your software up to date However, if you are a Chrome user, you may have been asked to update your browser several times this month alone

Google has been patching 8 zero-day vulnerabilities in its browsers since the beginning of this year, 4 of which were discovered and fixed in just 5 months As reported in hacker news, the search giant is now rolling out another fix to address Chrome's latest high-severity security flaw

This new zero-day, tracked as Cve-2024-5274, is a kind of confusing bug in the V8JavaScript and WebAssembly engines, and in addition to Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and other Chromium-based brows It was discovered by the researchers

For unfamiliar people, a type confusion vulnerability occurs when a program attempts to access an incompatible type of resource This allows an attacker to perform out-of-range memory access, crash a program, or execute arbitrary code, all sorts of problems

While Google doesn't mention much about this particular zero-day, it acknowledged that exploit vulnerabilities exist in the wild But, as it is often the case, the company says that the easiest and most important thing that hackers can do to stay safe from attacks by taking advantage of zero-day flaws like the one mentioned above, as I said before, is to use the software as a security flaw in their attacks

It is a good idea to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in the industry Hackers love to prey on users running older versions of popular software, especially if the fix has already been released

As for how to determine if an update is available, Google uses a color-coded warning system in Chrome When you look at your profile photo, you'll see a bubble next to it when there's an update It will be green for updates 2 days ago, orange for updates 4 days ago, and red for updates released at least 1 week ago

For those who don't want to wait for this bubble to appear, you can also manually check if Chrome updates are available by clicking on the 3 dot menu in the upper right corner of the browser From there, you need to open "Settings" and go to "About Chrome" If you are ready to install the update, Chrome will automatically start the download and apply it the next time you restart your browser

In addition to browser, operating system and other software updates, you should use 1 of the best antivirus software on your PC, the best Mac antivirus software on your Apple computer, and the best Android antivirus app on your Android smartphone to keep you safe from hackers You can also use the following methods:

Four zero-day flaws in a single month may sound like a lot, but at least Google says hackers will no longer exploit these flaws in their attacks, but it's already at the same time as last year, when 8 zero days were discovered and patched in Chrome, and it's not in the middle of 2024 

I expect we'll see even more Chrome zero days before the end of the year, so you can check out our regularly updated blog to stay protected