Over three billion people use Chrome worldwide, but after Google found the first Zero Day hack this year, everyone needs to update their browser as soon as possible.
In a new blog post, Google said that the Zero Day flaw was found and affected Chrome on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Google also said it knows a hack is out there in the wild.
The security hole, CVE-2023-2033, is caused by “Type Confusion in V8.” This happens when a program uses one method to allocate or initialize a resource. However, another way that is incompatible with the first method gets that resource, which could give an unauthorized user access to the browser’s memory.
Google’s Threat Analysis Group found the flaw, but there needed to be more time to make a fix before the first attacks on Chrome.
The good news is that Google has made a fix, but you need to update Chrome to get it instantly. To do this, click the three vertical dots (overflow menu bar) in the top right corner of the browser, then click Help > About Google Chrome. This will make Chrome check for new versions of the browser. Once the update is done, restart the browser to ensure you’re entirely safe.
This year, Google has done a great job fixing Chrome’s flaws, and it is impressive that it took until April for the first Zero-Day hack to happen. To put this in perspective, Chrome had 15 Zero Day attacks in 2021 and nine in 2022. This shows that Chrome is getting better.
This is also a big deal because Chrome is the most popular browser, so it has the biggest target on its back. Google told its users to expect the number of Zero Day attacks to keep going up until March 2022. However, the company has been very good at stopping the rising tide.