1013

They finally did it. Microsoft has successfully over-engineered a text editor into a threat vector.

This CVE is an 8.8 severity RCE in Notepad of all things.

Apparently, the "innovation" of adding markdown support came with the ability of launching unverified protocols that load and execute remote files.

We have reached a point where the simple act of opening a .md file in a native utility can compromise your system.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 4 points 6 months ago

To have something optimized they need to start from scratch with clean code

And honestly, that speaks more to the removal of features on the taskbar than Notepad.

One person could have rewritten Notepad from scratch in C++ in a day and bolted in Markdown in a relatively secure fashion in another 2. I doubt security even hit the requirements list. I'm not against moving windows components to Rust. I've not against losing features here and there to get there, but blatantly ignoring security because it's in Rust is downright stupid.

this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
1013 points (98.7% liked)

Technology

87646 readers
3305 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS