If you are using Google Chrome as a searching tool on your desktop or laptops, make sure you update it quickly to fix the two vulnerabilities - CVE-2019-13721 and CVE-2019-13720. These two flaws could let hackers get into your computer and might make you access or visit certain malicious sites allowing them to steal your private data or secured information.
These vulnerabilities also might allow hackers to get rid of sandbox protections, which provides another layer of protection against new security threats—zero-day malware and stealthy attacks. It means – a remote hacker can get into your data memory and can corrupt all your files and then execute arbitrary code. In simple layman terms – you are giving free entry to a hacker to your PC.
So far, not much technical information being provided or shared regarding the problem as concerned but the security team from Chrome said that both the glitches are use-after-free vulnerabilities, which was already stated above. Google came up with a 78.0.3904.87 chrome version to fix the vulnerabilities. This update is available for download on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
According to the Chrome Releases blog post, the update includes two security fixes - High CVE-2019-13721: Use-after-free in PDFium and High CVE-2019-13720: Use-after-free in audio. In the post, it is also clearly mentioned that Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2019-13720 which is already in the wild, as first reported by Kaspersky researchers Anton Ivanov and Alexey Kulaev.
In case if you couldn't find any update notification, navigate by following these steps – Go to Help -> About Google Chrome in the browser menu, to download it manually. For any extra information, kindly visit the Chromium Project page, which includes all sorts of open-source projects and allows interested developers to contribute to those projects.
However, in March 2019, Chrome faced a similar kind of issue, where they came up with the same kind of patch update, asking users to download the new version to protect their devices from vulnerabilities and threats. Though chrome is a user-friendly searching tool, a company like Google needs to look at the safety of the users upfront and consider it as an utmost priority. Because it's not just a matter of few users in the locality but it's about billions of users who are using it.
