Remember when Notepad was just… Notepad? A simple text editor nobody asked to be modernized?
Yeah, Microsoft didn’t care either. They bolted on Markdown support and AI features anyway. And now we’ve got CVE-2026-20841. Remote code execution. Via a text file. This is the kind of thing that makes you go “oh come on, really?”


I don’t think it does. The MSRC page linking to the notepad update release notes/download goto the windows store version of notepad, which lists a requirement of Windows 11 version 22000.0 or higher.
I haven’t gone more in depth than that though.
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-20841