It’s been a bad month for Windows 7 user group. The widespread WannaCry ransomware hit mostly Windows 7 machine, and now a new bug has been discovered that will slow down and crash down Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs. Ars Technica reports that the bug allows a malicious websites to try and load an image file with the “$MFT” name in the directory paths. Windows uses “$MFT” for special metadata file that are used by NTFS file systems, and Windows 7 and Windows 8 fail to handle this directory name correctly and started to crash.
The Verge has successfully tested the bugs on a Windows 7 PC with the default Internet Explorer browsers. Using a filename with “c:\$MFT\123” in a website image, our test caused a machine to slow down at once to the point where you have to reboot to get the PC working again normally. Some machines may even get bluescreens eventually, as the file system lock to that file and all other apps are unable to access file. The strange bug doesn’t affect Windows 10 users, and it’s similar to an old problems in Windows 95 and Windows 98 where references to “c:\con\con” would crash a machines.
The NTFS bug appears to have been discovered earlier this week and has been reported to Microsoft Inc. It’s not yet clear when Microsoft will deliver a fix for the problems, but it affects Windows Vista (which is unsupported), Windows 7, and Windows 8 machine.
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