Windows 10 Bug Corrupts Your Hard Drive On Seeing This File's Icon

Posted on Friday January 15, 2021

An unpatched zero-day in Microsoft Windows 10 allows attackers to corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive with a one-line command. Bleeping Computer reports: In August 2020, October 2020, and finally this week, infosec researcher Jonas L drew attention to an NTFS vulnerability impacting Windows 10 that has not been fixed. When exploited, this vulnerability can be triggered by a single-line command to instantly corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive, with Windows prompting the user to restart their computer to repair the corrupted disk records. The researcher told BleepingComputer that the flaw became exploitable starting around Windows 10 build 1803, the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, and continues to work in the latest version. What's worse is, the vulnerability can be triggered by standard and low privileged user accounts on Windows 10 systems. [...] It is unclear why accessing this attribute corrupts the drive, and Jonas told BleepingComputer that a Registry key that would help diagnose the issue doesn't work. One striking finding shared by Jonas with us was that a crafted Windows shortcut file (.url) that had its icon location set to C::$i30:$bitmap would trigger the vulnerability even if the user never opened the file! As observed by BleepingComputer, as soon as this shortcut file is downloaded on a Windows 10 PC, and the user views the folder it is present in, Windows Explorer will attempt to display the file's icon. To do this, Windows Explorer would attempt to access the crafted icon path inside the file in the background, thereby corrupting the NTFS hard drive in the process. Next, "restart to repair hard drive" notifications start popping up on the Windows PC -- all this without the user even having opened or double-clicked on the shortcut file.