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A nasty little bug appears to have made its way into the latest Stable build of the Chrome browser for desktop. More specifically, the flaw is specifically affecting MacOS devices running versions older than OS X 10.11 with System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled. The bug reports began circulating earlier this week as a number of Mac Pro workstations used for video editing were reportedly unable to reboot due to the file system corruption.
The culprit appears to be Google’s Keystone component of Chrome that is responsible for downloading updates for the browser. The good news is that the corruption is repairable. If your device has been affected by the bug, Google lists the following steps to revert the update while a new update is prepped for rollout.
First, you will need to boot your Mac into recovery mode. From there, you will open a new Terminal window from the utilities menu and input the following command:
chroot /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD # "Macintosh HD" is the defaultrm -rf /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundlemv var var_back # var may not exist, but this is fineln -sh private/var varchflags -h restricted /varchflags -h hidden /varxattr -sw com.apple.rootless "" /var
Reboot your device and the Chrome update that caused the problem will be removed and the corrupted files will be restored. Again, if are on MacOS version OS X 10.11 or later and have not disabled SIP, your device should not be affected and there’s nothing for you to do at this time.
Source: Chrome Support, Variety
