Google has rolled out security updates for the Chrome web browser to address a high-severity zero-day flaw that it said has been exploited in the wild.

The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2023-7024, has been described as a heap-based buffer overflow bug in the WebRTC framework that could be exploited to result in program crashes or arbitrary code execution.

Clément Lecigne and Vlad Stolyarov of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) have been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw.

No other details about the security defect have been released to prevent further abuse, with Google acknowledging that "an exploit for CVE-2023-7024 exists in the wild."

The development marks the resolution of the eighth actively exploited zero-day in Chrome since the start of the year -

• CVE-2023-2033 (CVSS score: 8.8) - Type confusion in V8
• CVE-2023-2136 (CVSS score: 9.6) - Integer overflow in Skia
• CVE-2023-3079 (CVSS score: 8.8) - Type confusion in V8
• CVE-2023-4762 (CVSS score: 8.8) - Type confusion in V8
• CVE-2023-4863 (CVSS score: 8.8) - Heap buffer overflow in WebP
• CVE-2023-5217 (CVSS score: 8.8) - Heap buffer overflow in vp8 encoding in libvpx
• CVE-2023-6345 (CVSS score: 9.6) - Integer overflow in Skia

A total of 26,447 vulnerabilities have been disclosed so far in 2023, surpassing the previous year by over 1,500 CVEs, according to data compiled by Qualys, with 115 flaws exploited by threat actors and ransomware groups.

Remote code execution, security feature bypass, buffer manipulation, privilege escalation, and input validation and parsing flaws emerged as the top vulnerability types.

Users are recommended to upgrade to Chrome version 120.0.6099.129/130 for Windows and 120.0.6099.129 for macOS and Linux to mitigate potential threats.

Users of Chromium-based browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi are also advised to apply the fixes as and when they become available.