this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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877
A remote code execution vulnerability has been found in Microslop Notepad (msrc.microsoft.com)
submitted 1 day ago by als@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/technology@lemmy.world
105 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 13 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Back in the year 2000 I was writing intranet apps for a big corporation, using Visual Basic and classic ASP (lol) and IE6 (lolol) for the UI. A very handy if not indispensable tool for this sort of work is the ability to View Source on the generated pages, which popped up the HTML in Notepad. One day for me this simply stopped worked entirely -- hitting View Source did nothing and I couldn't fix the problem on my computer no matter what I did (other people's computers still worked fine). I even switched to a different computer, set up all my tools and programs as normal, and got the same problem with View Source not working at all. I went like this for six months, and it was a real challenge to debug problems.

Eventually I discovered the problem from a forum post: I had a shortcut to Notepad on my desktop. For no reason I can possibly imagine, this prevented View Source from doing anything at all. It didn't even have to be a shortcut to Notepad proper; any shortcut that happened to be named "Notepad" would cause the break even if it was a shortcut to some other program. Renaming my shortcut to "NotepadX" fixed the problem. I would LOVE to have some old MS engineer explain to me what the living fuck was going on here.

[–] Liketearsinrain@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I have a pretty good guess. They were using ShellExecute or a similar API with only "notepad” as a name or "edit" as a verb. The search order would end up finding your shortcut first.

This would be odd behavior (the path should be be the full path and start at system32) but I don't have IE6 and Windows 95 to find the exact API lol.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

The search order would end up finding your shortcut first.

Sure, but in my case "Notepad" was a shortcut to actual Notepad.exe. It still should have worked.

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

iirc .lnk files didn't pass along params to the actual executable, at least not in 9x

src: first tech job was at a MS silver partner in the 90s

[–] limelight79@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago

That has to be some kind of special exception in IE6 that they were doing for debugging, and they failed to remove it. Crazy.