September 17, 2026
- BragJack hijacked the built-in assistants in five Chromium products — Gemini Live in Chrome, Perplexity Comet, Microsoft Edge, Opera Neon and the Claude in Chrome extension — from one ordinary browser extension, exploiting a shared design flaw rather than the models' guardrails. Reported capabilities vary by target: local file access, microphone/camera and screenshots on Chrome and Comet, browser-agent hijack on Comet, Edge, Opera Neon and Claude, with no further user clicks once the extension was in place. Two CVEs came out of it (CVE-2026-0628, CVE-2026-55945) and bounties ran $600–$7,000 per vendor. Forever Security, The Hacker News. Commenter matanix3 raises the obvious follow-on question — whether malicious websites can drive the same agents (discussion). · AI & Agent Security
- KREMLIN force-installs Chrome and Edge extensions without user approval — it waits for or kills the browser, copies the extension into the profile directories, enables developer mode, then retrieves the browser's own encryption keys to regenerate the Secure Preferences HMACs so the add-on passes Chromium's integrity checks. The chain starts from a JS file masquerading as an invoice, pulls Node.js, persists via scheduled task, and resolves its payload location from an Ethereum smart contract. Elastic tracks the Brazilian operation as REF9334 across at least seven campaigns since May 2025 impersonating 12 banks, with 1,515 confirmed infections almost all in Brazil. BleepingComputer, The Hacker News. · Threat Activity
in One Extension Hijacks the AI Assistant in Five Major Browsers