Google was carrying a serious vulnerability for which it has released the much-awaited Chrome update v81.0.4044.113. In a blog post, Google also divulged that there existed an exploit identified as CVE-2020-6457, while adding a vague description: Use after free in speech recognizer. However, the tech giant has not revealed anything else on the aforementioned vulnerability, but after security specialists have dug into the details, they found that the exploit has been marked 'Reserved' by the National Vulnerability Database of the United States. This suggests that the exploit in question may be a zero-day vulnerability.
While Chrome 81.0.4044.113 is being rolled out for Windows, Mac and Linux based systems automatically, you can check your version by yourself too. To do so, click on the three dots at the right top corner of the browser window. Then, click on Help -- About Chrome Browser. This reveals the present version, following which users can manually check for updates.
As for the flaw itself, cyber security experts suspect that the issue at hand is a zero-day hack because of the way Google is disclosing the issue. For such threats, if a hacker gets to know about the vulnerability code, they can easily tap into the source code, unearth the flaw and use it to breach a wide variety of data through the Chrome browser. Web browsers, as we have come to know, store a vast trove of personal data, which makes the situation more serious.
Alongside a new tab organisation feature that the update is bringing, it is imperative that users look out for this update keenly, and push the update to their systems promptly. Going forward, it remains to be seen if a future disclosure would reveal exactly what this threat may have brought with itself, and how this may have affected us had it not been for Google's apparently timely update.
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