Google has made every attempt to keep Chrome secure and safe from hackers. However, it was only a question of days before someone outsmarted their annoying sandbox and today is the day.

Google Chrome has been hacked by a browser plugin! The plugin checks for login account details on Gmail, Twitter and Facebook and runs with the help of JQuery. Once again ^[1], this is a proof of concept hack and will not leak any information retrieved in the process.

The hack has exploited the access to DOM, which the plugins are allowed. The hack can also be used to steal cookies and hijack sessions as reported by the hacker Andreas Grech ^[2] on his blog.

He writes,

The Google Chrome browser allows the installation of third-party extensions that are used to extend the browser to add new features. The extensions are written in JavaScript and HTML and allow manipulation of the DOM, amongst other features.

By allowing access to the DOM, an attacker can thus read form fields…including username and password fields. This is what sparked my idea of creating this PoC.

The extension I present here is very simple. Whenever a user submits a form, it tries to capture the username and password fields, sends me an email via an Ajax call to a script with these login details along with the URL and then proceeds to submit the form normally as to avoid detection.

Google Chrome’s sandbox for plugins just got pwned.

(Source ^[3])