Third-party developers have issued a fix for the vulnerability discovered earlier this month that corrupts Windows 10 hard 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,” OSR explained. “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 from Microsoft regarding 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.
