NTFS Bug Allows Sites To Crash Windows 7, 8.1

This Friday, a number of sites including Ars Technica, delivered the bug discovery news. They reported they have detected NTFS bug that crashing the web pages for those who still running operating system- Windows 7 or 8.1.

Remember the Blue screen of death? It’s kind of like that.

This Friday, a number of sites including Ars Technica, delivered the bug discovery news. They reported they have detected NTFS bug that crashing the web pages for those who still running operating system- Windows 7 or 8.1.

It’s like a bad month for Windows7 users. A few days ago, the widespread WannaCry ransomware hit mostly Windows 7 machines. And now this NTFS bug has been discovered that will slow down and crash Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs.

NTFS (New technology file system) is the file system that the Windows NT operating system uses for storing and retrieving files on a hard disk.

Peter Bright, Ars Technica, first searched what was going on what was going on. Because, certain bad filenames make the system lock up or occasionally crash with a blue screen of death, and malicious web pages can embed those filenames by using them as image sources. If you visit such a page (in any browser), your PC will hang shortly after and possibly crash outright.”

In actual, the bug takes advantage of special file names that cause the crash. In this case, the most sensitive file is $MFT. $MFT is reserved for a bit of NTFS metadata.

Zac Killian said, “There is a hidden $MFT file in the root of every NTFS volume; Normally Windows will not let you access it. A clever trickster figured out that if you use $MFT as if it were a directory. By trying to access “C:$MFTfoo”—the NTFS volume driver will hang.”

Wayne Williams, managing editor at BetNews said, “the NTFS driver takes out a lock on the file and doesn’t release it. This ultimately causes the affected system to slow down, and possibly bluescreen. The only way out of it is to reboot your system.”

A Russian system programmer working for Alladin RD, a security company detected the virus first. He then shared the information about it on a blogging platform- ‘Habrahabr’.

The verge next tested it with the default Internet Explorer browser.

Tom Warren reported, “Using a filename with “c:$MFT123″ in a website image, our test caused a machine to slow down to the point where you have to reboot to get the PC working again.”

“Some machines may blue screen eventually, as the file system locks to that file and all other apps are unable to access files.”

Now, Microsoft is looking into the matter. As the report suggests, they will fix it as soon as possible.

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