This Google Chrome Bug May Be the Ultimate Way to Crash Your Browser
A security researcher may have found Google Chrome's greatest bug of all.
Web browsers can get a bit buggy, especially if you try to crash them intentionally.
Latvian security researcher Andris Atteka did just that and may have found Google Chrome’s greatest bug of all, as The Guardian points out. Watch what happens when you try to type “http://a/%%30%30” into the search bar. (Make sure you put quotation marks around that URL or it’ll crash your browser.)
Atteka’s bug (mal)functions by putting null characters into the URL, which confuses the hell out of Chrome. He writes on his Blogspot — which crashes thanks to his own bug — “making secure software is much harder than finding issues in it. Thanks Google.”
So there you have it: Break Google to make it stronger. Or just send it to your friend and ruin their morning.
YouTube broadcaster Tom Scott (he of the Things You Might Not Know series) offers this explanation of why it works:
