Google on Thursday released security updates to address a zero-day flaw in Chrome that it said has been actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2024-4671, the high-severity vulnerability has been described as a case of use-after-free in the Visuals component. It was reported by an anonymous researcher on May 7, 2024. Use-after-free bugs, which arise when a program references a memory location after it has been deallocated, can lead to any number of consequences, ranging from a crash to arbitrary code execution. "Google is aware that an exploit for CVE-2024-4671 exists in the wild," the company said in a terse advisory without revealing additional specifics of how the flaw is being weaponized in real-world attacks or the identity of the threat actors behind them.

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