The blue screen is the most serious type of error in the operating system. This appears when a major problem occurs in the system so that, to prevent the PC from being damaged, Windows closes it and forces the user to restart. These errors usually appear when something happens with the PC drivers, there are attempts to access reserved resources and services or a serious error occurs with the kernel. They usually appear due to hardware failures or malicious software. However, they can also appear just by trying to visit a system path, as just happened this time.
It seems that 2021 is going to be the year of the strange errors of Windows 10. Last week we talked about an error in the NTFS file system that caused Windows to corrupt the drives and lose the data on the hard drives just by seeing an icon . Some users commented that the chkdsk command recovered the data, but others affirmed that it did not, that the disk was completely corrupted.
Now, a new inexplicable error appears in Windows 10.
Open a directory = blue screen
Last October, a security researcher discovered this bug and shared it with Microsoft, and users, via social media. And unsurprisingly, it was completely ignored, at least for Microsoft’s share.
The failure what it does is that, when trying to access a directory through a URL from another program, such as Google Chrome, the operating system crashes and shows a blue screen. This is not something that users will do on a daily basis, but it is something common among developers. And, of course, it’s something hackers can take advantage of.
If we write the command that you see in the previous image in the Chrome address bar, and press “Enter”, the operating system will be blocked for a few seconds and, immediately afterwards, the blue screen will appear. The system will dump RAM memory for later analysis and will restart directly when finished.
This blue screen can be generated by any user of the system, even those with a low level of privileges. In this way, anyone with access to the PC could lock the computer without any difficulty.
The bug seems to be present in all versions of Windows 10, from 1709 to the latest Insider build of 21H2. We have been able to verify that, after recovering the system from the blue screen, Chrome was disabled , and had to be installed from scratch again.
Microsoft knows about the bug, but it is not known if it will fix it
At the moment, we only know that Microsoft already knows the failure (although it should have known about it for three months, when it began to circulate on the network) but we do not know how it will act on it. Meanwhile, hackers can take advantage of this flaw in many different ways.
For example, it is possible to block the operating system using a simple URL file pointing to said directory, and even pointing to said directory on social networks or malicious web pages. User data is safe, but a DoS can be harmful to your PC and security, as well as annoying.