The US’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has added the latest actively exploited zero-day vulnerability affecting Google Chrome to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog.
With its addition to the KEV Catalog, CISA has effectively indicated that exploits for the vulnerability pose a “Significant risk to the federal enterprise,” and agencies in the Federal Civilian Executive Branch have been set a three-week deadline of October 23 to apply the recommended fixes.
Google hasn’t released many details regarding the vulnerability or the exploit chain, saying the restriction to information will remain until the majority of its users have updated to the safe version of Chrome.
Such exploits can often lead to crashes or the execution of arbitrary code on a victim’s machine, and the prevalence of Google Chrome throughout the world underlines the seriousness with which vulnerabilities like these should be taken, especially in the context of government-level IT. “These types of vulnerabilities are frequent attack vectors for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risks to the federal enterprise,” CISA said in its alert.
“CISA will continue to add vulnerabilities to the Catalog that meet the specified criteria,” it added.
Google has been busily patching zero-days in Chrome throughout September, including a similar-looking vulnerability at the start of the month, tracked as CVE-2023-4863.