URL bug brings Google Chrome to a dead end – Visiting – or simply moving the mouse over a link that contains a special sequence of characters, is enough to cause the current version of the Chrome browser to crash.
If you use Google Chrome, we draw your attention to this bug: According to VentureBeat, a certain sequence of text characters could cause browser to crash.
According to VentureBeat, simply appending “%%30%30” to the end of a URL will cause Chrome to crash. The bad news? You don’t even have to open a bad URL to cause the crash — just hovering over the link is enough to cause Chrome. (In other words, don’t add the above string to URLs unless you’re intentionally trying to crash your system.)
Security researcher Andris Atteka initially discovered the bug by entering a URL with the extra characters (a total of 26 characters), but VentureBeat notes that it can also be done with fewer characters, only 16 in total, to crash the browser.
Atteka states that this is "just a DOS vulnerability" - that is, crash-causing bug - so it's not a security flaw in the literal sense of the word. However, this bug has the potential to be quite annoying since all your open tabs and browser windows will be lost.
The bug affects current versions of Chrome, and will also crash Windows and OS X versions of the browser. Google has not yet released a patch for this bug, so be extra careful.
