In Windows 10 or 11 turn on Controlled Folder Access to protect your important local folders from unauthorized programs like ransomware or other malware. Get ransomware detection and recovery with Microsoft 365 advanced protection. Store important files on Microsoft OneDrive.

Learn about privacy concerns with apps having file system access and find out how to allow or deny apps and services from accessing your file system.

Ransomware protection: In this section you can configure Controlled folder access, which prevents unknown apps from changing files in protected folders. It also offers options to configure OneDrive to help you recover from a ransomware attack In the Windows Security app on your PC, select Virus & threat protection, or use the following shortcut:

Similarly, document-based apps may need access to your files to open, edit, and store your work. Because these file locations can contain personal content, you’re always in control of which apps can access your pictures, videos, and documents.

User Account Control (UAC) is designed to prevent unauthorized changes to Windows. When an action requires administrator-level permissions, UAC prompts you to approve or deny the change. This helps protect your Windows device from malicious software and unauthorized modifications.

Learn how to break permissions inheritance and grant, remove, or edit permissions to a SharePoint site, list, library, list item, or document for individuals or groups.

After you have set permissions for a library, you may want to set unique permissions on one or more folders in that library. For example, you may want to create a subfolder where anyone could read and add files to a subfolder, but not the root folder or any other subfolder.

Learn how to access Windows device security settings in Windows Security to help protect your device from malicious software.

How do I manage access to my Word documents? Show me how to create or open documents for co-authoring. How do I use versioning with Word? You can control the extent to which others are able to view or modify your Word documents. Options vary according to where your documents are stored.

This fix performs a FILE_LIST_DIRECTORY access check against the parent folder of the changed file or folder before reporting changes to an unauthorized user. If the user does not hold the necessary permissions, the change notifications will be filtered out, preventing unauthorized disclosure of file paths.