An exploit that fetched a teenage hacker a $60,000 bounty targeted six different security bugs to break out of the security sandbox fortifying Google's Chrome browser.
The extreme lengths taken in March by a hacker identified only as Pinkie Pie underscore the difficulty of piercing this safety perimeter. Google developers have erected their sandbox to separate Web content from sensitive operating-system functions, such as the ability to read and write files to a hard drive. Such sandboxes are designed to minimize the damage that can be done when attackers identify and exploit buffer overflows and other types of software bugs that inevitably find their way into complex bodies of code.