Coreflood Problems Highlight Unaddressed NTFS ADS Threat

“Threatened by legislation at both the state and the federal levels, spammers are increasingly turning to spam viruses to get their messages across.
First there was SoBig, a conventional email-borne virus that’s been responsible for propagating a benumbing quantity of spam. Now a new, far more insidious spam virus has appeared which exploits a little-known feature of Microsoft’s Windows NT File System (NTFS), called alternate data streams (ADS). Security experts say that the new virus could presage a raft of similar attacks, and — as if that’s not bad enough — an administrator who identified the virus early says that it and other ADS exploits like it aren’t detected by many of today’s most common virus- and Trojan-scanning tools.”

Another reason to use FAT32 unless you really need the security NTFS provides or need to support large volumes - unfortunately there’s no way to format a drive with FAT32 during Setup in Windows 2000 and XP - you must do it before Setup with a Win98/Me boot disk with format.com on it.