Security: This tiny Windows 10 shortcut can corrupt your hard drive
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Infosec researcher Jonas L has discovered a short string which, when it forms part of a filesystem pathway, will cause any Windows 10 hard drive to be corrupted.
The short string can be delivered to the OS in a number of ways, such as part of a zip drive, a Windows 10 shortcut, specially crafted HTML documents or even as part of a pathway of an icon for a file.
This means for example some-one could create a booby-trapped file on a network drive which, when the directory is browsed, would cause your hard drive to be corrupted.
The cursed string is $i30, an NTFS attribute, and when used like this ย for example, will start killing your hard drive.
It is not known why the string causes your hard drive to become corrupted, but reportedly a number of such triggers have been discovered but generally unfixed by Microsoft.
BleepingComputer asked Microsoft for a comment, and received the following reply:
โMicrosoft has a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and we will provide updates for impacted devices as soon as possible.โ
Read all the detail at BleepingComputer here.
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