Zero-Day Affecting Billions Of Chrome Intalls Is Under Attack, Update Now

Attention all Chrome users, Google is rolling out an emergency patch to address a high-severity zero-day security flaw in the world's most popular browser (by market share), and it's not one you want to ignore. That is because Google confirmed attackers are actively exploiting the flaw in the wild, making it an actual threat rather than a theoretical one.

Discovered by security researcher Shaheen Fazim, the flaw is being tracked as CVE-2026-2441 and is described as a "use after free in CSS" vulnerability affecting Chrome versions prior to 145.0.7632.75. Left unpatched, an attacker could remotely execute arbitrary code inside a sandbox via a crafted HTML page. It's a different threat than the one addressed in an emergency patch last November, but with similar implications.

As is standard procedure for this sort of thing, Google is keeping more fine grain details about the exploit under lock and key until the majority of Chrome users have a chance to update their browser.

"Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed," Google says.

Zero-day flaws are inherently dangerous, but even more so when they've been identified in active attacks. One thing to note is that there are billions of Chrome installations around the globe. Chrome is by far the most popular browser with a 76.39% share of the desktop market, and 71.37% across all platforms (including phones, tablets, and desktops), according to StatCounter. Those figures are up from 53.91% less than a decade ago.

In these situations, it's best to manually check for an update. You can do that by clicking on the three vertical dots in the upper-right corner of Chrome and then navigate to Help  About Google Chrome. This will prompt Chrome to check for and download any applicable updates. Once installed, you will need to relaunch the browser.

Updating at the time of this writing brings the 64-bit build version in Windows to 145.0.7632.46.