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.
To be fair, markdown is a very cool standard.
While I don’t know if it really makes sense for Notepad to be anything other than a plain-text editor, there are better tools for that, supporting markdown is kind of nice.
This means you have support for it on fresh Windows installs, which could be good for virtual machines. That said, Markdown is intrinsically pretty readable without formatting anyway.
It’s a shame they flubbed the implementation though…
Windows used to come with notepad (raw text) and wordpad (basic markup). It would have made more sense to keep wordpad and add markdown to it instead so there would still be something that is just raw text.