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.
It sounds like a link can be a file path and clicking the link just opens the file. If that’s the case, this is effectively the same risk as filesystem shortcuts.
Or the same risk as just clicking on random links.