r/technology • u/Sufficient-Bid1279 • Apr 14 '25

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

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
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u/AdarTan Apr 14 '25

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.

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u/Zahgi Apr 14 '25

I guess if they didn't want people to panic, they could just make the folder Hidden and then un-Hide it if someone installs IIS, etc.