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.
“launching unverified protocols” - does that mean the network fetching is done by the Notepad app, and Notepad doesn’t open the browser for this…? If so, bloody hell, Microsoft…
As I understood it, there can be specifically crafted links in Markdown documents, which, when clicked, will download a file and then execute it.