Opening this path causes a BLUESCREEN [The new C:\con\con]

Accessing a certain path causes a BSOD, just like C:\con\con used to do! Watch this video to dive into the details of it, and to see how certain actors could potentially misuse this!

0:00 - Intro
0:27 - #1: Another news article
0:53 - #2: What is happening?
3:48 - #3: Lots of misuses
5:56 - #4: Confusing Windows Defender
8:48 - #5: Other Windows Versions
9:32 - #6: Conclusion
9:53 - Outro
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#bsod #lookinside #flytech #con

[itswilliamanimate]

finally, a way to escape school by doing this trick before class

[b-battledroid]

"hey teacher here's the link to my assignment"

[thebevan]

Firefox crashing before pressing enter is because when hovering over a URL/typing one in it auto loads it before clicking on it to make it load "faster"
Source: Firefox user

[I.____.....__...__]

3:52 This wasn't Windows trying to prevent repeated misuse, what happened was that when you saved the file, it wasn't written to the disk, it was in a disk-cache, and you crashed the system before the buffer was flushed to disk, but the MFT contains the expected size of the file, so when you open it, it just shows the correct number of bytes, but all null.

This is an insidious problem that most people aren't aware can happen.

I learned it the hard way one day when I had a BSOD and upon reboot, noticed that some files that had been created just before the crash were now blank. If I hadn't noticed, they would have remained blank but still set to the expected size and no indication of corruption. The reason I noticed was because the files were image files and when I rebooted, I noticed they weren't showing thumbnails. If not for that, I could have continued on, blissfully ignorant of corrupted files forever.

Now, whenever Windows crashes, I boot into safe-mode to prevent files from being written to the disk, then do a search for files created or modified in the past day, and check the last few that were touched before the crash to see if they were corrupt.

If you want to avoid losing data of an important file, you can get Uwe Sieber's drive-tool FFB to manually tell Windows to Flush File Buffers to ensure the file is written out to disk. It's one of the most important tools.


This happens on internal drives that have their policies set to optimize speed since they're not removable; removable drives like flash-drives and memory-cards default to quick-removal and should write data directly to the drive, not to a buffer (at the expense of speed). You can usually change the policy of drives in the Device Manager.

5:44 Or you can hold down the Shift key to prevent startup items from running. Also, you put it in "shell:startup" which puts it in the current-user's auto-run. Holding Shift during boot will prevent the system from automatically logging into the user's account, so you can log into a different user and delete it from there. If you put it in "shell:common startup", then it would run on boot, so you'd have to hold Shift to prevent auto-run from running.

7:53 This is probably a race-condition, the shell is trying to run the random file before it's finished being written. Try changing the command to put the run command on the same line as the copy command with with double-ampersands (&& instead of &) to require to only run if the copy command has returned success.

8:11 It's heuristics. Defender is detecting "suspicious activity".

8:50 Yup, this problem was only on Windows 10, not older versions. I keep saying, not all updates are good, in fact, most updates just make things WORSE, not better. 😒

[pilotwings]

“Oops! Just crashed my computer. What a shame, I was looking forward to online classes!”

[Povilaz]

Ah, time to do this during online classes and say that my PC died lmao.

[renakunisaki]

No doubt the reason the file is being replaced with zeros is that it crashed before the disk cache was flushed, so the file content hadn't actually been written to disk yet. If you create the file and then reboot normally, it should stay. That also explains why some other methods didn't have that problem, because they took longer and did more file I/O, so the cache had time to be flushed.

This is also why it's important to shut down properly.

[zoomosis]

5:45 I believe you can hold down Shift key after login to bypass running anything from the Startup folder, which gives you time to delete the .exe.

[magenta]

Your videos just scream the words "I'm a computer geek/nerd, and this is fun to do."
Earned yourself a sub from me today m8.
:)

[earthboiproductions]

Don't mind me, sending the link to my friend and calling it an "easter egg"

[LeftWithTheNorthernMoney]

I remember you could say "con" in online games and the servers would crash.

[Alulaa]

3:48 it's not really intentional
- the file is blank because data doesn't get flushed to disk soon enough
- the task scheduler and other things are stored in registry which is never saved when system crashes
- if you've created a file and waited a moment or better - restarted the system before doing anything, it should would work as expected

[bit-]

school computers are living in constant fear everywhere

[OzzlyOsborne]

Setting up a blue screen boot loop on a scammers PC would be an amazing prank lol

[DenisDaLynx]

"teach your tech how to fly"
well, not so sure if i really want to

[QuickenFixen]

Wow that’s really interesting. Is there any documentation on the thing where Windows replaces the characters with null bytes in the batch file? I’ve actually been seeing that exact thing happen on some Windows machines at my job and couldn’t figure out why an XML file had a bunch of null bytes in it instead of the data I expected.

[alejandroalzatesanchez]

Bug path exist in Windows 10*
Windows: In this moment cell meets the real terror

[android-erfg]

8:12 Windows Defender is trying to read the code of the exe and found the file path, so when it try to open the file path to scan it, windows just crash

[teridactyl]

I’ve found something else with this - I tried it and then deleted the extracted folder. Now opening the recycle bin causes a bluescreen.

[DavidWonn]

I’m very glad you tested on previous NT-based Windows to be thorough. I was tempted to check NT 3.51 and 4.0 but I highly suspect they’re safe from this.

BTW, you might be able to prevent it from running upon startup of Windows if you hold the Shift key in some cases.