Windows 10 zero-day gets quick fix courtesy of third-party devs
The fix makes a great stop-gap until Microsoft issues a patch
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Third-party developers have issued a fix forthe vulnerabilitydiscovered earlier this month that corruptsWindows 10hard drives. Given that the flaw can be triggered simply by delivering a seemingly harmless shortcut file, affected individuals will no doubt be happy to employ any temporary fix, as long as it proves effective.
System software firm OSR has now released an open-source filter driver that prevents the vulnerability from corrupting NTFS drives. The filter driver will monitor attempts to access streams containing the $i30 attribute that triggers the flaw. If detected, these will be blocked before any damage can be caused.
“There’s no way to fix this problem without an update to Windows,” OSRexplained. “In the meantime you can download our mitigation filter from GitHub.”
A temporary fix
Earlier this month, security researcher Jonas Lykkegaard discovered that attempting to access the $i30 NTFS attribute on a folder in a particular way would cause the user’s NTFS hard drive to become corrupted.
Of greater concern was the fact that threat actors could exploit this vulnerability remotely by delivering payloads that contained a reference to the $i30 file path, such as HTML files or ZIP archives. Despite the fact that Lykkegard has been flagging this vulnerability for a while now, there has been no word fromMicrosoftregarding when a long-term fix will be issued.
As OSR states, there is no way to fix this corruption flaw without a Windows update being released. In the meantime, however, the company’s filter driver makes for a great mitigation option. Should a more permanent fix be offered, users can easily uninstall OSR’s filter driver with a single-line command.
ViaBleeping Computer
Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
Barclay has been writing about technology for a decade, starting out as a freelancer with ITProPortal covering everything from London’s start-up scene to comparisons of the best cloud storage services. After that, he spent some time as the managing editor of an online outlet focusing on cloud computing, furthering his interest in virtualization, Big Data, and the Internet of Things.
New fanless cooling technology enhances energy efficiency for AI workloads by achieving a 90% reduction in cooling power consumption
Samsung plans record-breaking 400-layer NAND chip that could be key to breaking 200TB barrier for ultra large capacity AI hyperscaler SSDs
NYT Strands today — hints, answers and spangram for Sunday, November 10 (game #252)
