Month: December 2023

Google researchers report critical zero-days in Chrome and all Apple OSes

Discoveries made by Google’s Threat Analysis Group, which tracks nation-state hacking.

The phrase Zero Day can be spotted on a monochrome computer screen clogged with ones and zeros.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Researchers in Google's Threat Analysis Group have been as busy as ever, with discoveries that have led to the disclosure of three high-severity zero-day vulnerabilities under active exploitation in Apple OSes and the Chrome browser in the span of 48 hours.

Apple on Thursday said it was releasing security updates fixing two vulnerabilities present in iOS, macOS, and iPadOS. Both of them reside in WebKit, the engine that drives Safari and a wide range of other apps, including Apple Mail, the App Store, and all browsers running on iPhones and iPads. While the update applies to all supported versions of Apple OSes, Thursday’s disclosure suggested in-the-wild attacks exploiting the vulnerabilities targeted earlier versions of iOS.

“Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited against versions of iOS before iOS 16.7.1,” Apple officials wrote of both vulnerabilities, which are tracked as CVE-2023-42916 and CVE-2023-42917.

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