The bug was discovered by a Russian system programmer going by the name of Anatolymik, working for information security company Alladin RD. The programmer shared technical details on Monday, on Habrahabr, a blogging platform for Russian-speaking users.
The issue, which doesn’t affect Windows 10, can be exploited when the user tries to open a non-existent file with a malformed path.
This can happen when the user tries to open the file directly — via a Run command or other means — or the path is secretly loaded in the background of a web page, as an image’s source URL.
The problem is with the $MFT file, which is the Master File Table, a file found on all NTFS volumes. This file is the most important file on a disk partition, as it tracks of all files on the volume, their physical location on the hard, their logical location inside folders, and all sorts of file metadata.
