CISA Issues Emergency Patch Directive for Chrome Zero-Day (CVE-2026-2441)
By Hacklido News Desk February 19, 2026
The honeymoon period for 2026 is officially over. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has fast-tracked the first actively exploited Google Chrome zero-day of the year into its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.
The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-2441, is a high-severity memory corruption bug that effectively turns a simple web visit into a potential entry point for Remote Code Execution (RCE).
Technical Deep-Dive: Iterator Invalidation in the CSS Engine
The vulnerability, reported on February 11 by researcher Shaheen Fazim, is a Use-After-Free (UAF) located in the CSSFontFeatureValuesMap component of the Chromium rendering engine.
While Google is keeping the specific PoC (Proof of Concept) under wraps to prevent wider exploitation, the technical "root cause" has been identified as an iterator invalidation flaw. In practical terms:
- The browser loops over a set of font feature values.
- During this loop, a specific CSS rule triggers a change to that set, freeing the memory associated with it.
- The browser continues to use the "stale" pointer (the iterator), allowing an attacker to spray the heap and occupy that freed memory with malicious shellcode.
Because this vulnerability lives in the CSS engine—historically considered a "safer" part of the browser than the JavaScript V8 engine—it bypasses many traditional heuristic detections that focus on malicious scripts.
The CISA Mandate: March 10 Deadline
CISA’s inclusion of CVE-2026-2441 in the KEV catalog carries significant weight. Under Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01, all Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies are now legally required to remediate this flaw by March 10, 2026.
While the mandate technically only applies to federal agencies, it serves as a "red alert" for the private sector. If CISA puts it on the list, it means there is verified evidence of threat actors—likely advanced persistent threats (APTs) using this exploit in the wild to gain initial access to corporate networks.
The Chromium "Blast Radius"
As a Chromium-core vulnerability, the risk is not limited to Google Chrome. Users of the following browsers are in the line of fire until their respective upstream updates are applied:
- Microsoft Edge
- Brave
- Opera
- Vivaldi
"This isn't just a browser bug; it's a sandbox breach in the making," says a senior researcher at Hacklido. "An attacker who successfully exploits this gains a foothold inside the renderer process. From there, they only need one more sandbox escape to own the machine."
Hacklido Analysis: The Return of Memory Safety
This zero-day highlights the ongoing battle between performance and memory safety. The fact that a "Use-After-Free" can still occur in such a mature component of Chromium shows that as web standards (like complex Font Feature mappings) grow, so does the attack surface.
Remediation Steps for Admins:
- Check Your Version: Windows/macOS builds must be at 145.0.7632.75/76 or higher. Linux builds must be at 144.0.7559.75.
- Audit "Zombie" Tabs: Updates only apply after a browser restart. Use enterprise management tools to force-restart browsers that have been running for 48+ hours.
Monitor for Heap Spraying: High-end EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) tools can be tuned to look for the specific heap allocation patterns associated with this CSS-based UAF.
Stay ahead. Stay dangerous.
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