Pierluigi Paganini November 01, 2019

Google released security updates to address two high severity flaws in Chrome, one of which is actively exploited in attacks in the wild to hijack computers.

Google released security updates to address two high severity vulnerabilities in the Chrome browser, one of which is a zero-day flaw actively exploited in attacks in the wild to hijack computers.

The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2019-13720 and CVE-2019-13721, reside respectively in Chrome’s audio component and in the PDFium library.

“[$7500][1013868] High CVE-2019-13721: Use-after-free in PDFium. Reported by banananapenguin on 2019-10-12[$TBD][1019226] High CVE-2019-13720: Use-after-free in audio. Reported by Anton Ivanov and Alexey Kulaev at Kaspersky Labs on 2019-10-29″ reads the advisory published by Google. “Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2019-13720 exists in the wild.”

The vulnerabilities affect the Chrome browser on your Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. Google released the Chrome version 78.0.3904.87 to fix the issues, users are recommended to install the update immediately.

Google did not provide technical details of the flaws, both flaws could be exploited by a remote attacker to elevate privileges on the Chrome web browser and escape sandbox protections.

“Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed.” continues the advisory.

The vulnerabilities could be exploited by tricking Chrome users into visiting specially-crafted malicious websites and potentially run arbitrary malicious code on the targeted systems.

The zero-day flaw in the audio component, CVE-2019-13720, was reported by Kaspersky researchers Anton Ivanov and Alexey Kulaev. According to the security duo, the flaw has been found exploited in the wild, though the experts did not attribute the attacks to a specific threat actor.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Chrome, hacking)

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