Google’s April Fools prank accidentally broke website’s own security

The prank inadvertently broke the website’s security but things got patched up before hackers figured out the loopholes

Some companies that we know of religiously follow the April Fool’s Day trend and among them is Google but this time around their prank was no ordinary laughing matter. It seems that Google itself was made a fool out of as it prank turned extremely wrong. Just like every year, Google did something ‘fun; for its users on April Fool’s Day with the Google logo appearing upside down on the side. This change however compromised the security of the website.

UK research firm Netcraft, being the first one to discover that the prank had broken into the website’s security, said “The prank compromised the site’s own security by omitting a crucial header that makes it vulnerable to user interface redressing attack, such as click-jacking.”

Click jacking has been used by hackers all the time to trick users into clicking something which they think is something else. Thus, the click-jacking technique follows this trick to get confidential information and sometimes even allows the hackers to take control of the users’ computers. According to the research firm, “This vulnerability would have allowed a remote attacker to change a user’s search settings, including turning off SafeSearch filters.”

Fortunately for Google, hackers didn’t have enough time to reach this loophole because Netcraft was on time when it informed Google about the vulnerability. So for now everything has been patched up and looks safe.