Now would be a good time to ensure your Windows OS is up to date. Microsoft recently patched a serious vulnerability in Windows 11 related to Notepad, its text-editing tool.
The company said it fixed a “remote code execution” vulnerability. As technology website Techradar noted, the vulnerability had to do with Markdown — in which users can employ symbols to format text (e.g., asterisks to create italics) — which could allow bad actors to insert a dangerous link.
“An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad, causing the application to launch unverified protocols that load and execute remote files,” Microsoft wrote in a security bulletin. “The malicious code would execute in the security context of the user who opened the Markdown file, giving the attacker the same permissions as that user.”
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Tech site Bleeping Computer tested the vulnerability and found that Microsoft now displays a warning before allowing such a link to be clicked. It’s pretty much the standard “this link may be unsafe” message most users have seen before.
The vulnerability should have been automatically fixed via a patch, but it’s worth double-checking to ensure Windows 11 has been updated recently on your device.
