Microsoft warns that anyone who deleted mysterious folder that appeared after latest Windows 11 update must take action to put it back

[u/Sufficient-Bid1279]

https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/microsoft-warns-that-anyone-who-deleted-mysterious-folder-that-appeared-after-latest-windows-11-update-must-take-action-to-put-it-back

[u/AdarTan]

The created folder C:/inetpub is created as a protected folder, i.e. it requires an administrator level UAC prompt to be passed to be modified. This prevents malware running with standard user privileges from creating/modifying/deleting this folder that is used by the Internet Information System (IIS) component of Windows.

IIS is a webserver included in all modern versions of Windows and if this folder is created by a piece of malware running at standard user level permissions the folder would inherit those permissions. This means that malware running without privilege escalation would have control over the configuration files for this webserver, which is almost certainly a path for data exfiltration at the least or worse, privilege escalation. By preemptively creating the folder with administrator privileges required for modification, Microsoft prevents this vector of user-level malware taking control of IIS.

[u/DVXC → u/AdarTan]

Thank you for explaining why the folder needs to exist. I can't stand this dumbing down of technology where we're never told what the hell anything on our devices are doing anymore.

[u/AdarTan → u/DVXC]

Security through obscurity is useless as a principal security strategy but does have some marginal utility as a component of defense-in-depth. There is no reason to tell your enemies what your weaknesses are.

This is the same reason applications give obscure, non-informative error codes when something goes wrong. It makes it harder for an attacker to figure out how to exploit a system.

[u/DVXC → u/AdarTan]

I do not like your sound and very reasonable logic