Microsoft patches serious NTFS drive corruption flaw in Windows 10... but there's a catch
Around a month and a half ago we reported about a serious flaw in Windows 10 that could be exploited to corrupt the contents of an NTFS drive. With Microsoft dawdling in its response, it was down to security researchers from OSR to produce a third-party patch.
But now Microsoft has stepped up to the plate and, finally, come up with an official fix for the flaw. Sadly, it's not all good news as the fix is not currently available for everyone.
See also:
- Security researchers develop unofficial patch for drive-corrupting Windows 10 NTFS bug
- Serious Windows 10 flaw could corrupt your hard drive if you open a folder
- Microsoft releases KB4601382 update preview to fix many Windows 10 problems
Although the company did not advertise the fact, it seems that the recently released Windows 10 build 21322 addresses the drive corruption flaw. The bug exists because of an issues with the $i30 NTFS attribute which means that accessing the path c:\:$i30:$bitmap will cause drive corruption -- although this should be reversible using the chkdsk tool.
As Bleeping Computer reports, if you try to access this problematic path in build 21322, you will see a message that reads: "The directory name is invalid".
The bad news here is that build 21322 of Windows 10 has only been made available to Insiders on the Dev channel. It's hard to say if Microsoft will be releasing a separate patch for earlier builds of the operating system, or if we'll have to wait for this dev build to progress to the main release channel.
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