With the latest Insider update to Windows 11, Microsoft refreshed its 30-year-old FAT32 file-system with support for a maximum volume size of 2 TB. The file-system was limited to 32 GB until now. This update, however, does not change the maximum file-size limit of 4 GB. The move is probably aimed at making life easy for enterprises using the file-system for whatever reason, or for high capacity removable media to have better cross-platform support (eg: to video equipment). If you mainly move files within a Windows ecosystem, it's highly recommended that you stick to NTFS as it offers security features and support for larger files, which FAT32 doesn't.

Windows OS security is taken seriously, as the OS is wide-spread across millions of PCs around the world, however, there may be issues where OS has some security flaw that is found by external researchers. Due to the sheer code base of the new OS like Windows 10, there are a plethora of bugs and security flaws waiting to get discovered by someone. And today, thanks to the team of cybersecurity researchers, we have found out that in Windows 10 file-system called NTFS, there is a bug that corrupts your hard drive by simply triggering a specific variable name in a file.

If the end-user inside Windows 10 tries to access the NTFS attribute called "$i30" in a specific way, the flaw is exploited. The NTFS search index attribute, specifically the string "$i30", is containing a list of files and subfolders in a directory, and there is even a log of deleted files and folders. After running a specific command inside the command line (CMD) or inside the browser, Windows will start to display warnings of "File or directory is corrupted and cannot be read". After that, the OS will prompt a user to restart the machine and repair the damaged drive, so the Windows disk check utility will start. Once corrupted, Windows 10 will start displaying a notification indicating that the main file table (MFT) on the particular disk is corrupted and thus can not operate. Starting from the build Windows 10 Build 1803 the OS is vulnerable until the current version and a possible fix is expected to be released soon.

You've heard of the Petya ransomware by now. The surge, which hit around 64 countries by June 27th, infected an estimated 12,500 computers in Ukraine alone, hitting several critical infrastructures in the country (just goes to show how vulnerable our connected systems are, really.) The number one hit country was indeed Ukraine, but the wave expanded to the Russian Federation, Poland, and eventually hit the USA (the joys of globalization, uh?) But now, some interesting details on the purported ransomware attack have come to light, which shed some mystery over the entire endeavor. Could it be that Petya (which is actually being referred to as NotPetya/SortaPetya/Petna as well, for your reference, since it mostly masquerades as that well-known ransomware) wasn't really a ransomware attack?