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.
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.