Just by typing a route in your browser, you can get your computer to be locked forever, as well as being a gateway for ‘hackers’
Cleaning is essential for our gadgets but we normally don’t get time due to work. But, one fine day, you just wake up and start working on your PC. Luckily, you find that you do have much work to do, so you decide to do the cleaning of your computer and its parts.
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Thus, you start deleting folders and files and end up going into the Windows directory. What is your surprise when, after entering a certain address, you find that your computer gets frozen and there is no way to get it to work again. That is precisely what has happened to a Windows security researcher.
Jonas Lykkegaard was not working that day, but he decided to enter the bowels of his computer in order to know in-depth how ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ were linked to each other.
Not surprisingly, its main function is none other than to find security problems in Windows that can become an opportunity for malicious people. But, without a doubt, what he did not expect was to find a double-edged error: on the one hand, a simple route that ends up blocking the computer; on the other, a gateway for ‘hackers’ exposed.
Lykkegaard wrote the following path in his browser
\\.\globalroot\device\condrv\kernelconnect” which, of course, we recommend that you do not write unless you want your computer to freeze and you can never use it again. As explained by the researcher in ‘Tom’s Guide’, when this path is written in Windows 10, the system cannot check for errors when trying to connect, which ends up becoming a BSOD block, regardless of whether or not you have permissions, such administrator.
For those more seasoned in the guts of a computer, you will soon have seen that the path refers to ‘kernel’, the kernel of Windows. Or, put another way, one of the crucial parts that allow the operating system to work well, making the drivers run correctly and the programs start and end without giving errors, allowing a connection to the ‘hardware’ without errors and allowing everything to flow normally. That is why this failure is so important: not only does it block all processes, but it can be a security hole, it is important.
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According to the experts, this failure is present since Windows 10 version 1709, as well as in later ones. Obviously, the problem would be less if the computer only blocked if we entered this address in our browser, something that, knowing it, we will not do to avoid problems. However, hackers can use this error to carry out denial of service entry attacks, managing to deactivate an entire network from the computer itself and making it useless for the user.
The good news in this situation is that it has been a Windows security expert who has discovered this weakness, so the company is already working on trying to carry out a patch to solve this problem.
“Microsoft has a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and we will provide updates for impacted devices as soon as possible”, as explained to ‘Bleeping Computer’ by a Microsoft researcher.
What can we do while the security update arrives? Very simple: the main and fundamental thing is not to write this route in our browser to avoid blocking our PC at all times. The second step to take into account is to be, if possible, even more, attentive to suspicious emails and messages that reach us in the mail, which may contain an ‘exploit’ that violates that security hole in our computer. It will be a matter of weeks, at most, for Microsoft to fix this strange bug.