Rufus Accuses Microsoft Of Blocking Users Trying To Download Windows 11 Insider ISOs

You probably already know that you can manually install a fresh copy of Windows using your own install media. You can create this install media using Microsoft's tool, or you can use a tool like Rufus, which allows you to bypass the onerous and arbitrary system requirements of modern Windows versions. At least, you can do that as long as you either get the ISO yourself or grab the latest version of Rufus that fixes the download function.

Here's the story: users attempting to download the latest Windows 11 insider build, 28020.1611, as well as the Server preview build 29531, were greeted with error messages claiming that the downloads were blocked. Specifically, they got message code 715-123130, which indicates that the request was rejected. This is a familiar problem, but it's usually caused by VPN use or excessive, frequent download attempts.

In this case, folks simply trying to download the ISO were being blocked on the first attempt. The reason? As it turns out, Microsoft added additional checks to the download, no matter how you source it, that require extra queries to an "ov-df.microsoft.com" domain that is apparently associated with "fraud detection and prevention."


Seeing this, Rufus developer Pete Batard accused Microsoft (on Github) of aiming to block the Fido tool that downloads the ISOs for Rufus. In reality, that doesn't actually seem to have been the case, as even direct downloads from Microsoft's website perform these same checks; blocking connections to the "ov-df" domain breaks downloads on the site, too. Still, it's easy to understand his frustration, as this is not the first time Fido has broken due to a change on Microsoft's side.

Notably, though, Fido doesn't download insider builds, meaning that this "fraud detection" was being applied even to the standard Windows 11 builds that Rufus can grab for users. Given that, it's not completely clear that the Rufus issue is actually the same as the Windows Insider download issue despite that they share an error code and are chronologically concurrent. Perhaps Microsoft added the 'fraud detection' check to track who's downloading Windows and some Insiders got caught in the crossfire. We'll probably never know.

In any case, Batard has patched Rufus to work around the new verification checks and downloads work in Fido once again. As for folks complaining of issues downloading the Insider builds, it does seem to be a small subset of users, not a more global problem. If you're affected by the issue, make sure you let Microsoft know on the official Feedback Hub.