The odd set of characters appear to send the popular web tool into meltdown, forcing it to crash. However the link could be still misused for causing unnecessary troubles as just hovering the mouse cursor over the link can cause the browser to crash. The issue stems from the inclusion of a NULL character in the URL and has already been reported to Google. In his example, he used a 26-character string to crash Chrome. The Chrome crash bug is, however, not considered a security threat per se. And surely enough, a person named Andris Atteka discovered a seemingly simple bug or rather a simple string which can crash Chrome. You can try it yourself.

After his discovery, Emil Protalinski from VentureBeat came up with an even smaller string of 10 characters http://a/%%30%30 which has the same effect of crashing that Chrome tab or the entire browser.

Google are thought to be fixing the bug, but Chrome users are being warned to watch out for fake tweets tempting them into trying the bug. “In the Debug build, it’s hitting a DCHECK on an invalid URL in GURL, deep in some History code”, explained developer in response to Atteka’s finding. “Given that it’s hitting a CHECK in the Release build, I don’t think this is actually a security bug, but I’m going to leave it as such”. To save our readers the hassle, we avoided making a hyperlink of the offending characters.

It’s no secret that Chrome has been rising in popularity through the years, and is helped by being installed by default on Android devices. The mobile version of Chrome, meanwhile, seems to be unaffected, as it doesn’t crash with either of the two URL string examples.