Security – How do NTFS permissions become improperly ordered

filesystemsnetwork-sharentfsSecurity

I have some files on a network share and they were read-only accessible to users. I had set the permissions to provide full rights to all domain users – when I checked the main folder, this was still set, but at deeper levels it was sent to read-only. When I right-clicked on the child folder it told me that the permissions where improperly ordered and then allowed me to reorder them. How does this happen?

Best Answer

There is no one definitive way for them to get out of order, it can happen a few different ways. Some that I've run into:

  • Making a rights change and hitting cancel cancel OMG cancel in a panic before it gets done applying (kinda bad if you do it at the top of a 4-million file directory tree).
  • Command-line utilities (I'm thinking xcacls, I believe) that didn't respect ordering, you could shoot yourself in the foot easily that way.
  • Backup utilities that misbehave on restore.

There are probably more!

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