Google Chrome hack earns security researcher $60,000

A Russian security researcher has earned himself a tidy $60,000 by demonstrating how he could waltz past the security sandbox in Google’s Chrome browser to run unauthorised code on fully-patched Windows 7 computers.

Sergey Glazunov uncovered a remote code execution vulnerability in Chrome, that could be used by malicious hackers and cybercriminals to install and run code on innocent users’ computers, just by them visiting a website.

Glazunov, who is no stranger to reporting bugs in Chrome, won his substantial reward as part of the Pwnium competition run by Google at the CanSecWest conference in downtown Vancouver.

Sundar Pichai, a senior vice-president at Google, wrote on Google+ that his developers were “working fast on a fix” that would be pushed out as an automatic security update to Chrome users.

Google announced last month that they were offering…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.