CRIME (Compression Ratio Info-leak Made Easy) is a serious security vulnerability (CVE-2012-4929) that exploits data compression in HTTPS and SPDY protocols to steal secret authentication cookies, allowing attackers to hijack web sessions. The attack works by an attacker observing changes in the size of compressed network traffic while tricking a browser into sending crafted requests, allowing them to infer the secret cookie content byte-by-byte. The vulnerability was hypothesized by Adam Langley and first demonstrated by security researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong (creators of the BEAST attack) at the 2012 ekoparty security conference. While browsers like Chrome and Firefox mitigated the threat against SPDY and TLS compression by September 2012, the attack vector against standard HTTP compression remained unpatched. This gap later led to a more widespread variant called BREACH, announced at the August 2013 Black Hat conference, which specifically targets HTTP compression to uncover HTTPS secrets.