Notepad++ Finally Patches Their Update Clusterfuck

Oh for fuck’s sake. Just when I thought developers couldn’t get any more monumentally incompetent, the Notepad++ team decides to prove me wrong by letting their entire goddamn update mechanism get hijacked like a piñata at a hacker convention. The update feature—the one thing that’s supposed to keep you safe—was actively serving malware to unsuspecting dipshits who trusted it to work correctly.

Turns out these brilliant minds thought verifying digital signatures was just a “nice-to-have” feature, not a “prevent-your-software-from-becoming-a-malware-distribution-platform” requirement. So some enterprising bastards—who probably have more talent in their left pinky than the entire dev team combined—figured out they could MITM the whole pissing process and push targeted spyware to specific victims. It’s the digital equivalent of leaving your car running with the keys in it outside a prison, then acting surprised when someone drives off with it.

The attack was beautiful in its simplicity: intercept the update request, serve your own malicious payload, and watch as your high-value target happily executes it because hey, it’s from Notepad++, it must be legitimate! Meanwhile, management is sending panicked emails asking if we should “uninstall the note pad program”—no, you should uninstall your own spinal cord and save evolution the trouble.

Now they’ve “fixed” it—presumably by actually implementing the security controls they should’ve had from day one, instead of whatever half-arsed certificate checking they were doing before. They’ve released version 8.8.8 or whatever the hell number they’re on, and the official advice is to “update immediately.” Yes, trust the update mechanism. Brilliant fucking strategy that. It’s like recommending someone get back in the same car that just lost its wheels because “we’ve tightened the bolts now.”

Here’s what you actually do: Download the installer manually from their website—DON’T use the auto-updater, you complete fucking muppet. Verify the GPG signatures if your tiny brain can handle the concept. Then sacrifice a chicken to the cyber security gods and hope they find your pathetic offering acceptable. And maybe—just fucking maybe—consider using an editor that doesn’t have the security posture of a soggy biscuit, like VS Code or an abacus.

Link: https://thehackernews.com/2026/02/notepad-fixes-hijacked-update-mechanism.html

Related anecdote: User called me yesterday saying their Notepad++ was “acting funny” after an update. Turns out they’d been ignoring update prompts since 2019 because they were “annoying.” When I told them their laziness probably saved them from being pwned, their face looked like I’d just taught their dog to file taxes. Still wiped their machine though—can’t be too careful, and I needed the stress relief of watching them rebuild their environment from scratch.

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