Several security researchers have reported a Windows 10 bug that can corrupt your hard drive. This bug allows hackers to hide a specially crafted line inside a ZIP folder, file, or even a simple Windows shortcut. Users only have to extract the ZIP folder or open the folder containing a malicious shortcut to trigger hard drive corruption. Researchers are describing it as a ‘Critically Underestimated NTFS vulnerability as this Windows 10 bug can corrupt the hard drive by just looking at an icon or folder
This bug was observed around Windows 10 build 1803, the Windows 10 April 2018 Update. And, it continues to cause hard drive corruption even in the latest versions.
This problem seems to be introduced around the time of Windows 10 1803. Prior versions of Windows do not appear to be affected.
Will Dormann, a Vulnerability Analyst at the CERT Coordination Centre
Security Researcher Jonas L has mentioned that this Windows 10 bug can make the NTFS hard drives critically vulnerable. Even the standard and low privileged user accounts can trigger this bug, requiring no special admin rights to trigger or special write permissions.
The vulnerability will instantly pop up complaining about your hard drive being corrupted when the path is opened. The vulnerability can be remotely triggered if having any service allowing file opens of specific names to happen. It’s embeddable in HTML, shared folders, etc.
Jonas L
EndNote
Due to this bug, you may encounter Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) errors popping on your PC screen with different stop codes such as 0xc0000225, 0x00000050, 0xc0000001, 0x000000C2, etc. The bug may also prompt you to reboot the PC to repair the corrupted hard disk records. On doing so, Windows will run the CHKDSK process on boot, which usually repairs the disk corruption and fixes the hard drive errors. But if the CHKDSK command fails to repair the drive automatically, manual intervention may be required.
Was this article helpful?
