Google patches its fifth zero-day vulnerability of the year in Chrome

CVE-2024-4671, is a “use after free,” a class of bug that occurs in C-based programming languages. In these languages, developers must allocate memory space needed to run certain applications or operations. They do this by using “pointers” that store the memory addresses where the required data will reside. Because this space is finite, memory locations should be deallocated once the application or operation no longer needs it.

Use-after-free bugs occur when the app or process fails to clear the pointer after freeing the memory location. In some cases, the pointer to the freed memory is used again and points to a new memory location storing malicious shellcode planted by an attacker’s exploit, a condition that will result in the execution of this code.