Comment by r2vcap
7 days ago
A few days ago, Notepad++ got compromised—apparently by a state actor (or a proxy). And now, today, Windows’ built-in Notepad has a fresh CVE. What a life.
At this point, what am I supposed to do other than uninstall Windows completely? No real sandboxing, a mountain of legacy…
Well technically Unixes like Linux are a mountain of legacy and they are fine.
Windows is just a mountain of shit.
> a mountain of legacy and they are fine.
telnetd CVE-2026-24061. It's embarrassingly simple exploit but took years to be discovered.
> When telnetd invokes /usr/bin/login, it passes the USER value directly. If an attacker sets USER=-f root and connects using telnet -a or --login, the login process interprets -f root as a flag to bypass authentication, granting immediate root shell access.
Well yeah, but nobody sane still uses telnetd.
"Fine"
Why does every Linux distro under the sun try so hard to protect the garbage under /usr/bin/ and /etc/ when literally the only files that matter to me are in /home, which is a free-for-all?
Because Linux (and other nixes) have their root in multiuser/time-share systems/servers. Protecting the system* from the users was important, and protecting users from other users equally as important. Protecting the user's $HOME from themselves/user-level programs wasn't as much of a concern, the user was assumed to be responsible enough to manage it themselves.
>Why does every Linux distro under the sun try so hard to protect the garbage under /usr/bin/ and /etc
Because a compromised user could infect shared executables and spread the infection. A bit harder to do with etc but for sure possible. The main target would be infecting bash and you are done from the get go.
>when literally the only files that matter to me are in /home, which is a free-for-all?
The home folder's read write is usually restricted to the user. The only scenario where this isn't the case to my knowledge is Ubuntu where others can read it, but this is just a huge flaw in Ubuntu that almost no other distro has.
11 replies →
Linux /home is far from a free for all. flatpak, landlock, selinux, podman, firejail, apparmor, and systemd sandboxing all exist and can and do apply additional restrictions under /home
Canonical and Red Hat have been modernising things for a long time, albeit slowly. Most funds went into server components.
As for the desktop community… Well, it has a severe lack of professionals.
The first point is fairly obvious and the latter point is not true (AppArmor etc)
4 replies →
Unixes like Linux are not immune.
True, as systemd and wayland point out elegantly. But at least there is a modicum of choice there.
1 reply →
> At this point, what am I supposed to do other than uninstall Windows completely?
Uninstall Windows completely 4 years ago when Windows 11 was released heralding in a new era of absolutely insane, self-destructive, unnecessary and unwanted shit?
There is no valid excuse for this vulnerability. It's existence is a category error that's only possible because Microsoft has completely jumped the shark. Continuing to use /any/ of their products is a choice to accept pure insanity as a default.
That was a CCP group compromising the Notepad++'s underlying hosting provider; not really much to be done there aside from switching hosting providers. The update validation was also improved, and there's also scoop if you don't trust the built-in updater. Fortunately the attack was narrowly targeted and the IOCs are known.
It was not compromised a few days ago, that's just when the attack was disclosed. The actual compromise and exploitation happened months ago for several weeks.
I still use VIM in the terminal. So far, I'm fine, but I assume there's gonna be some inevitable CI/CD compromises sooner or later.
we still need a mouse icon rce until we reach peak
>No real sandboxing, a mountain of legacy…
You have:
- Windows Sandbox (consumer-level sandbox) - Creating a separate User (User folders are permission locked to their user by default, system binaries cannot be modified without admin access) - HyperV (VM hypervisor) - Edge Browsers
Don't get me wrong MSFT quality is dropping steeply, but this is still a strong point. For comparision, on Ubuntu, user folder by default can be read by all users.
>Creating a separate User (User folders are permission locked to their user by default, system binaries cannot be modified without admin access)
Common practice, and even encouraged by Windows itself, is having the administrator account be the only account. This misuse is a very common thread in Windows systems, and security breaches alike.
Windows has garbage defaults, but if you read through their documentation on enterprise architecture they definitely do not recommend having admin be the only account. They do in fact encourage separate accounts, multiple level of privileges with login restrictions across different types of machines, etc.
Many Linux distros are also guilty of this, disabling the root account by default and having the only user have sudo privileges, just like Windows.
1 reply →
> Common practice, and even encouraged by Windows itself, is having the administrator account be the only account.
This hasn't been true since Vista. Kind of even before that with XP, it really showcased using multiple accounts to home users with a much more stylized user selection screen.
Install vim for Windows. I just use gvim as a notepad replacement. No plugins or anything required.
There's also good old edit... ;-)
https://github.com/microsoft/edit
Yeah, it's a re-creation of edit, but it's pretty great... also runs outside windows.
Visual Studio Code was not compromised.
Visual Studio Code is the compromise
Neither is Neovim, Sublime Text, Visual Studio, ed, etc... So what? This is still unacceptable