Last month the maintainer of Notepad++ published a disclosure that will make any developer or sysadmin uncomfortable.
For about six months, from June through December 2025, the software's update mechanism had been hijacked by a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor.
Every time a targeted user hit "Check for Updates", they were potentially downloading malware instead of a legitimate new version, and the installer looked and behaved exactly like the real thing.
Notepad++ is not a niche tool. It is one of the most widely installed text editors in the world, used daily by developers, system administrators, network engineers, and security professionals.
That demographic is precisely why it was targeted. In enterprise environments, these are often the most privileged users on the network. Compromise their workstation through a trusted update and you have bypassed the perimeter entirely.
The attackers did not touch a single line of Notepad++ source code. They...
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