Gemini’s chrome side panel cracked open by a malicious extension—camera, mic, files all exposed

A hole in Google’s baked-in AI assistant let any halfway-clever browser extension turn your laptop into a spy rig. Palo Alto’s Unit 42 dropped the details Monday: the flaw, tagged CVE-2026-0628, lived quietly inside Chrome’s side panel for Gemini, the search giant’s chatty co-pilot. One bogus “PDF highlighter” or “dark-mode” add-on could slip code into that panel and inherit its crown-jewel privileges—camera, microphone, file system, the lot.

The bait was a plain browser add-on

Chrome presents Gemini as a polite overlay that never forces you to leave the tab. That convenience is precisely what attackers weaponised. Because the panel runs with Chrome’s internal credentials, a malicious extension granted only the most routine “read site data” permission could pivot sideways, inject scripts and upgrade itself to OS-level snooping. Researchers proved the point: silently starting webcam recordings, scraping screenshots of banking tabs, even listing local directories—all without the usual permission pop-ups that users have learned to dread.

Google patched the mess in January, three months after Unit 42’s October heads-up, and the fix rolled out with the usual silent update mechanics. Most Chrome installs are already immune. Still, the episode is a cold reminder that every new AI surface inside the browser is also a fresh attack plane. Extensions—those tiny icons we install and forget—remain the weakest stone in the wall.

Google declined to say whether the flaw had been exploited in the wild, but the company’s bug-bounty logs show a surge in side-panel reports since Gemini’s rollout. Translation: the hunt isn’t over; it just moved one layer deeper.