First spotted by Deskmodder, a bug affecting Windows Defender seems to create thousands of small files, resulting in gigabytes of wasted storage space. The file names appear to use MD5 algorithms and are a result of a recent Microsoft Defender antivirus engine update from the end of April. According to Bleeping Computer, the bugs’ randomly created files range in size from 600 bytes to a little over 1KB located in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Defender\Scans\History\Store. While seemingly tiny and harmless, hundreds to thousands of these files can add up to a significant amount of wasted space on your hard drive. One user on Reddit noted an increase of millions of files added to their drive that took up 50-60 GB of space. “Our alerts for HDD space started going off last night. One server has 18 MILLION FILES in the Store folder. Another has 13 MILLION. Taking hours just to discover all of the files so that they can be deleted,” the Reddit user wrote on a thread about the issue. “This is a major screw-up from Microsoft.” Lifewire reached out to Microsoft for comment on the bug and to find out how many users were affected by it. We will update this story when we hear back. Since a full hard drive can usually cause your system to run slower, Windows 10 users should update their systems to the latest version of the Windows Defender engine, known as 1.1.18100.6. While a nuisance for anyone with a PC, the random files are relatively easy to remove from your drive. Simply go to the Store under Windows Defender, press CRTL + A to select all the files in the folder, then press Shift + Delete to delete all the files permanently.
