Paint’s image decoding engine is a shared system component and during thumbnail and visual preview generation it gets called automatically without opening the GUI. Ergo it’s enough for a malformed image file to exist on your device to get pwnd.
Do you have details on this? Given that this is classified as a network vulnerability of the Paint application itself rather than any shared system components, I assumed it had to do with the recently-introduced Copilot features which AFAIK are the only part of the application that directly interact with the network.
While I understand your phrasing getting downvoted, I agree with what I assume you mean:
1. Telemetry as implemented is usually sloppy. Even though intuitively one could think that telemetry means “data gets collected locally and fired off to a remote server”, we have seen time and time again that they also build a return path to make the telemetry gathering more powerful. That return path can be a vector.
2. Web browsers have a _huge_ surface and they connect to remote servers constantly. The industry does very well at being proactive and at addressing CVEs but the whole premise makes that very difficult and so we cannot absolutely claim that browsers don’t have RCE(s).
What return path could possibly lead to a RCE? That's crazy, no telemetry requires "backend could return any command that gets run on the client", you're doing telemetry in a very non-standard way if this is even possible.
At worst, the telemetry backend might first send the client a config, but none of that would contain executable commands because again, that'd be crazy.
> we cannot absolutely claim that browsers don’t have RCE(s).
Of course, you can never prove the absence of bugs (and/or security issues), but given that browsers aren't wildly exploited at this very moment, nor have been for quite some time, we can pretty confidently claim there are no browser RCEs in wide use today.
It's true that browsers have pretty big attack surface, but it's also true that it's the class of software that gets the more pentesting, since the payoff would be so great when you manage to find holes.
API protocol says “return value is either “OK” or “ERR””, attacker sends “Floccinaucinihilipilification”, overflowing the 3-byte response buffer allocated on the stack.
I'm sorry, but I still find it hard to believe you work with other professionals that when they implement telemetry in client applications, that usually ends up exposing a RCE on the client because of the telemetry implementation.
I'd go out on a limb here perhaps, but I'd claim that if your telemetry means that the one SENDING the data gets a RCE by default by it, you're doing telemetry very wrong. Maybe look into different libraries/services than the ones you use today, please.
If I had to guess, without diffing old/new, it's probably related to the generative erase/ai shit.
To stack assumptions, I'd reach for something like using the recent certificate circus to present as there being an updated version of whatever model it uses on the PCs that can run it locally to give it a fucked up model that does the out of bounds shit as part of whatever verification/checks it does after its downloaded/installed.
Either the description or the impact is wrong. You can't trigger MS Paint in a '0-click' attack, and OOB read are not sufficient to directly obtain code execution. So I'll let you guess which one is wrong.
It's quite common with vulnerabilities found by IA, there might be less hallucination, but the impact/score is often completely wrong.
Some years ago, I ended up on a call with a support team guy, helping him under some parts of a system I worked on. He shared his screen, started drawing diagrams. It took me a whole 10 minutes to realise it was in paint, he was just that good at using it.
Turns out paint was the thing almost every customer had installed/had access to, so he worked to the lowest common denominator and got really good at using it. I guess now he'll need to find a new tool to astonish devs with.
If you're in support across multiple customers, especially in regulated industries, you learn to rely on the minimum common denominator, which usually means OS utils.
And at the end of the day $2 and $2000 screwdrivers are both still screwdrivers.
Before MS, there was a time where it wasn’t possible to get a virus by receiving an email. Users had to click on the attachment. Email itself is a text protocol after all.
Then they added automatic HTML parsing of incoming emails, and the attackers cheered.
They supposedly did, that is why most stuff on Azure is now a mix of Java, C#, Go and Rust with very little C and C++.
And there is the SFI program.
However this is a Windows application, and in spite some Rust advances in WinDev, it is pretty much C and C++ turf, with Rust getting the same warm reception as .NET used to enjoy.
Guess which language is Paint written on?
Nonetheless, they are doubling down on sandboxing Windows, macOS, iOS and Android style, for quite some time, exactly to become security first as you are asking for.
Windows Update and Store are slowly becoming the same, and Paint gets delivered via the store for quite some time, there was even some drama related to it.
Did the same and it quickly updated itself when I went into the "Paint" page (but I had to go there first). No indication of what just happened a few seconds later.
Get-AppxPackage -Name Microsoft.Paint | Select-Object Name, Version
But I can only get Microsoft.Paint 11.2609.401.0 and Microsoft has said different things in different places, so it's not even clear if this has the fix or not.
What kind of nonsense are you writing here right now? When the next Linux kernel CVE happens, you'll also delete all the kernels from your fleete because they're a malicious backdoor?
When did y'all stop using some basic sense before writing? -_-
Maybe we can blame PowerShell a bit for confusing names on this one. Get-AppxPackage does not download or install anything, contrary to what one might wrongly assume.
>It's a built-in tool of the OS, not some random spyware
Oh no dont get me wrong, it's definitely not some random spyware, it's deliberately made by Microsoft targeted at Windows Users who cant buy a Enterprise License.
For a split second, I visualized you walking into a brick and mortar Microsoft Store to get your security update done on your laptop, and somewhere in the middle of that split second I caught myself thinking „typical Microsoft“, and then I came to my senses.
This seems to affect only paint 11.0.0.0 up to, but not including, 11.2605.91.0.
For folks like me, running a much older version, its probably safe, although its Windows so, I'm not too sure.
I'm amazed MS Paint is somehow up to version 11, let alone 11.2605 (!). I literally can't remember the last time I used it, but what are they even changing?
I remember when I was doing pixel art, there were some purists that insisted that using layers and transparency/opacity to create windows for your buildings is more or less cheating. According to them, one should manually figure out what the color palette should be for things seen through a window.
Anyway, I continued using layers and transparency/opacity. Pixel art was hard enough already for me, so I didn’t feel that it made sense to artificially make it even more difficult for myself at the time. I had enough other aspects of pixel art to work out already in order to try to get better at it.
And create single-pixel images. My most used application of Paint by far is creating single-pixel PNG files to work around the fact that "solid color" is not an option for lock/login screen backgrounds.
There's some suggestion there that shapes (including lines) are separate entities from pixels. Wikipedia references a now-deleted answers.microsoft.com version of the first question https://web.archive.org/web/20250203164656/https://answers.m... with a couple of people saying that resize is useless. Wiki also says "re-copied" images blur, which is why I wondered if that meant pasting. Also this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5673783/... a complaint that the tool for drawing pixels doesn't indicate exactly which pixel it will draw to.
I can't reproduce any of those issues. When drawing the indicator snaps to a pixel, so it's perfectly clear where it's going. When I draw a line, it's pixel-perfect when moving the control points, likewise after it finalises. And when I copy a section of the image and paste it back in, it's pixel-perfect as I move and when I finalise. There doesn't seem to be a true resize; all I seem to be able to do is change the size of the canvas, which doesn't add any kind of aliasing.
But I've only used the program for less than 5 minutes, so maybe it's configured differently?
Reminds me of Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment[^1,2]: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
I hope MS is not getting exclusive right for manufacturing spoons because I want mine to scoop up stuff like soup or ice-cream without smart features activated by elegant touch UI on the handle like cutting down trees being in the way to the grocery store to 'elevate user experience', or others. This stuffing more and more into everything and anything for the sake of shock and awe is a stupid (and dangerous) thing.
You haven't spotted that it's regularly being released the month following the revision number. (-: Because Microsoft will of course have a release pipeline that things have to go through.
They're not a positional notation. It's version 11.2605.91 recently. It was 11.2605.81 earlier this year. There was an 11.2605.71 and an 11.2605.61 before that. Last year, there was a 11.2504.451 . The year before there was a 11.2402.32 .
Microsoft's versioning systems are not 4 columns where a tick around of one increments the one before it. The easiest way to think of them is madness made for marketing purposes. (Windows NT starting at 3.1, for example.) There is some logic to it, but nowadays it's often four entirely different things jammed together, ticking around independently. Like the version of Windows, the year and month of the release, and perhaps a daily build number or some such.
Windows NT itself has a monotonically increasing build number as part of its versioning that started some time in 1992 and is currently just over 26 thousand.
Windows 7 added ribbons to the UI. It's unlikely it was a rewrite. Just a retooling of what Vista had, which in turn what Windows XP had, which... [continue down the line until Windows 1.0].
You can't have finished software any more. It's now illegal or something. Must keep changing things forever. And must add some AI features of course, to make the VCs happy.
yes that is my exact situation. I think (hope?) Microsoft would've disclosed it if prior versions were affected too, although I never heard the "old" paint have anything to do with network, so there's that.
WHY ON HELL paint has a remote code execution in the name of God?
WHY? is this because someone who needs to build a CV decided to network something on ..... I can't come with a reason why "An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network." will cause paint to start being nice to an attacker and leaking crypto secrets etc.. the thing says sending a specially crafted packet.. this means windows is part of the attack vector, but that just makes the WHY bigger, really, why?
>I can't come with a reason why "An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network."
The Microsoft link doesn't mention this at all, so my guess it's "remote" in the sense that a zip file exploit is "remote"
> How could an attacker exploit this vulnerability?
> An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to execute code on the target system. No authentication or user interaction is required..
Remote, and inapplicable. One of the very few things the Microsoft link does mention that no user interaction is required. A banana left out in the walkway still requires the user to go for a walk.
Any extraction of behavioural surplus is a win, Nadella went hard on this in Windows 11. If you are drawing something for your child in paint, you might want to buy pampers or something.
- not in paint, but something you can't disable/remove in hardened special purpose windows setups
- not be easily usable by 3rd parties, like some auth accidentally accepting some quite specific other password (e.g. due to some bug reading the expected hash from the wrong place) or similar
lets not forget as much as the NSA might want to spy on you they also want to keep China/Russia out of spying on US companies. A traditional RCE in paint is very counter productive for that.
unless they actively work with MS to keep their backdoor fresh, one can reasonably assume a potential backdoor _was_ well-hidden and advanced for the time period when it was introduced. What about after 20 years and LLMs decompiling everything?
They (and other governments) can do multiple things at the same time.
One one hand they can actively try to work with companies to get secret back doors put in, sure. But I imagine that's not usually very successful. Lavabit chose to go out of business instead of doing so... I wonder who else is out there that we don't know about.
But we also have evidence that they actively look for, buy, and hoard, unknown (to the vendor) exploits for their own possible later use in case they need it for something.
I'm sure you can imagine that it's much more advantageous to keep collecting all kinds of different ways to get into a system in case one method is not applicable for any number of reasons.
I believe they're already quite happy with the Windows OS itself for this purpose, and probably some other firmware-level rootkits across many products like Intel and Qualcomm chipsets. Their contracts with Meta might be helpful too.
Presumably as part of the generative AI stuff they crammed into it? They've been hilariously cagey about the details here which makes me think it has to be AI-feature related
Not sure what you think is "hilariously cagey", but why would they only be "cagey" if the bug was from ai-features?
Also it says paint versions are "affected from 11.0.0.0 before 11.2605.91.0" which I take to mean the bug has been there since Windows 11 was released in 2021
> An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to execute code on the target system. No authentication or user interaction is required.
It's bizarre that you're doubling down in the face of statements from Microsoft's security experts who have the full context of the investigation and the source code. It's worth some self-reflection on what drove you to make this post.
The boilerplate FAQ text is frequently wrong or incomplete. You can go through the catalog and look through some of them and see how many have multiple revisions. I think, if you want to know definitively, you have to patch diff it
It says that "no user interaction is required", so phishing is explicitly not what this vulnerability is about.
You haven't declared any privileged knowledge of this attack or MS Paint and have, on vibes, doubled down on what you assume must be going on despite other evidence.
> Maybe you should self-reflect on why you are offended by my comment
A significant chunk of the world's problems today are caused by or exacerbated by people who confidently assert things they believe regardless of what evidence or experts say, and who dismiss expertise. Those people are emboldened by others allowing them to spew nonsense unchecked, and I have no interest in seeing HN degraded similarly.
You're moving goalposts. A commenter asked what Networking MS Paint had in the context of this vulnerability. You made an assertion not supported by the documentation we had, and now you're trying to claim that there could be other vulnerabilities rather than admitting that you made a mistake without doing any research.
> An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to execute code on the target system. No authentication or user interaction is required.
At the moment I just use Zed, or I imagine I'd be fine with Sublime. When I used Jetbrains/VSCode, I would grab Notepad/Notepad++ when I didn't want to wait for them to open, set up a project, etc. But if something 'heavyweight' is quicker than notepad, and the features don't get in my way, I don't need anything else. In fact I still appreciate the extra functionality with those one-off text/data/scripts - format, regex replace, diff, occasionally even LSP like shellcheck
mspaint.exe is quite likely to have at least one code execution vulnerability if one opens a malicious file, but I bet it's very safe against remote attack :)
Firearms are now exposing the inherent vulnerability of human flesh against small projectiles flying faster than the speed of sound. Before that we were just fist fighting eachother and we were trained for that. But no mo! Get your dragon's breath today at $199.99!
I was saying this is just one case where we can say the reason about copilot, there are dozens of reported vulnerabilities, bugs in kernel, rust. and many more elite products which were authored by so called elite developers.
You willingly let "perfect" be the enemy of "good" in this case. It's absolutely possible to build software runtimes that obviate this type of nonsense. It's not grandstanding by elite developers, most of these choices are common-sense mitigations.
--Another vulnerability in ssh accounts that should never take a password at all (root, your key-only deploy user, ldap users, the default user on alpine's aws and azure images) take any password longer than 256 characters.
I guess these also belongs to your common sense mitigation category but this has been there since 2016.
-- struct's lifetime requirements can be bypassed via covariant field assignment,
11 year old rust compiler bug. how about this?
Why on Earth do you have to give Paint, internet? How is that a technical debt? Making all nice little fully offline apps Internet Nightmare Slop is wag beyond debt.
It might not be paint with internet, it might be something like a packet over your network asking a computer to open an input/file, and the computer responds by opening that malicious input with paint
Presumably this is like many other graphics tool vulnerabilities this works by the attacker persuading a user to open a file that exercises the bug. Not terribly unusual.
I'm no expert but so much of Windows is implemented as services. svchost.exe is probably involved somehow. Like it wouldn't surprise me if Copilot is implemented as a service and it talks to Paint via IPC messages or something
It would make sense that it could listen for messages like "your generated image is ready!" and pass bitmap data to Paint. And media like images are a common source of vulnerabilities since you're basically passing binary data into the software.
This site absolutely does jokes, it just doesn't beat horses into bloody pulps with the jokes the way reddit does. We have a higher standard. A joke has to actually be funny, and not some tired reference.
Not to imply any particular comparison to less serious websites where the karma system over time may have resulted in a disproportionate surplus of one liner jokes and other spammy low quality posts.
Tangential, but: "We're sorry but the CVE Website doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled."
Usually I just enable JS. But is this a security site, asking for remote code execution on my device? Before they can show me some text? They just disqualified themselves.
I'm just in full denial that paint runs a server. Happy to be corrected if someone has a windows machine handy to verify.
But From [0]:
> A total of 59 of the October CVEs fit my definition of wormable. Specifically, 57 contain both “An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network” and “No authentication or user interaction is required.”
Makes you wonder if MS is just copy-pasting boilerplate on CVEs and disclosed incorrectly the scope of the one in Paint because they had 56 other bugs to disclose.
So I'm not discounting reporting human error here, yet.
"An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to execute code on the target system. No authentication or user interaction is required.."
It mentions that it may rely on other services or security measures running- I wonder if there’s something like this hitting a firewall or av and then that calling out to paint to check file type or size out something like that?
But why MS Paint? What functionality does it offer to another program to get called on specifically? And if this other service isn't calling on it specifically, what else can it be tricked into calling? And how many of those are also vulnerable to being stabbed in the back? The smaller interior holes are a problem, sure, but it seems like the CVE should be for the hull hole in that case.
Sounds like they just mean opening a file that you got from somewhere else.
>The CVSS score of 8.1 marks this as a high‑severity RCE. The EPSS score is not available, and the vulnerability is not listed in CISA’s KEV catalog. Based on the description, the likely attack vector is remote: an attacker can deliver the malicious file over a network connection, for example via Remote Desktop, file shares, or other network‑exposed services that allow users to open images. The lack of EPSS data does not diminish the threat posed by a known RCE, but it does make precise likelihood estimation difficult.
> After applying the update, verify that the target Windows systems are running a version that includes the CVE fix before disabling legacy file‑open processing in Paint.
Which is complete nonsense. "Legacy file-open processing" isn't a real configurable option in Paint and this seems to suggest that enabling it is some sort of mitigation. The resolution is simply to update Paint.
The direct implication is that current generations of ms paint are a “service over the network.” Probably a theoretically possible RPC end point of svchost.exe
I'm thankfully out of the loop on Windows these days, but as I remember it Paint did not have any network features? Is that still true? If if is, maybe it is a misfiling of the CVE and it isn't remote?
Or are they chaining a browser auto opening a download in paint, (but browsers shouldn't do that)...
Why for the love of everything that is good does MS Paint have network trash in it. It's a super simple bitmap editor. Like Notepad, it's simple and just works.
Make a new product and bundle that as an option if you want to drastically change the functionality.
> Notepad in Windows includes AI features powered by Copilot that help refine and shorten text with the assistance of GPT. By default, these AI features are enabled on managed devices
I wonder if it could be through a file:// or some deeplink custom url handler that opens in Paint and clicking on it with some carefully crafted file path could make it read out of bounds (since that's the associated weakness reported) and execute something.
Whatever it is, it doesn't require any clicking or user interaction. Maybe my imagination is just limited but I can't imagine why Paint is making itself available for incoming traffic on the network.
Mine doesn't have a mouse or keyboard at the moment, so I'm only checking over an SSH->WSL connection. But it sure doesn't look like it's opening any ports from here.
So I guess either some random OS component is listening to the network and just-as-inexplicably asking Paint to do something for it. Or one of Paint's outbound connections is vulnerable if hijacked by a mitm. Network interception's one of the examples used for the "High" Attack Complexity rating that MS gave this CVE. Maybe powered by eMudhra for any systems that haven't revoked those certs? That'd be topical.
But still wouldn't really make sense. A patch for machines that are actively updating Paint but dodging cert revocations? Nothing really makes sense about this silly Paint CVE.
Or maybe after the .bmp file is executed, it can install something that opens an outbound TCP connection to its C2, and thus can receive commands. Would not need admin privileges because it doesn't open a port, just 'outbound' connections, like a long-poll.
you are right, it seems like the latter outbouns tcp connection is already being opened by paint, and that is what is exploitable.
since it exposes no port, I’d assume it isn’t trivial to exploit, paint will chose its target (a microsoft domain or IP), the exploit must involve some error in destination selection, or simply allowing a mitm to impersonate microsoft.
this is inline with Attack Complexity High, attacker needs to be either in the network path (mitm) or control the erroneous destination of the connection (say mircosoft.com), possibly blocking (dosing) the higher priority genuine destination
Seems odd even for a vibecoded copilot integration to make repeated, unprompted network requests. And if they're not repeated and unprompted, then we don't meet the "no user input" requirement.
Because the definition of "remote" has been expanded in the name of resume-driven development to include sending a malicious file that a victim has to open.
> The vulnerable component is bound to the network stack and the set of possible attackers extends beyond the other options listed, up to and including the entire Internet.
The way I read it is MSPaint is now running as a service and listens to a port (while running? all the time?) and you can trigger remote execute by sending data. Just.. Why?..
At this point I want to declare that air-gapped network with the transfer only over USB drives is a viable and valuable method of handling IT security. Outside transfer only happens by people manually copying text onto a floppy and reading it from a floppy.
I love Microsoft! Who else might look at a fully offline drawing app and think: "Man this needs the most severe level of networking access capable of remote code execution", and that surely is to put their useless Copilot to absolutely nowhere. Next headline will be "All user credentials stolen from Notepad"
Paint can exectue arbitrary code from the REMOTE, without USER INTERACTION?????
We seriously need more information.
Paint’s image decoding engine is a shared system component and during thumbnail and visual preview generation it gets called automatically without opening the GUI. Ergo it’s enough for a malformed image file to exist on your device to get pwnd.
Do you have details on this? Given that this is classified as a network vulnerability of the Paint application itself rather than any shared system components, I assumed it had to do with the recently-introduced Copilot features which AFAIK are the only part of the application that directly interact with the network.
Feels like this was placed on purpose
Every program which has telemetry can. And web browsers.
How?
While I understand your phrasing getting downvoted, I agree with what I assume you mean:
1. Telemetry as implemented is usually sloppy. Even though intuitively one could think that telemetry means “data gets collected locally and fired off to a remote server”, we have seen time and time again that they also build a return path to make the telemetry gathering more powerful. That return path can be a vector.
2. Web browsers have a _huge_ surface and they connect to remote servers constantly. The industry does very well at being proactive and at addressing CVEs but the whole premise makes that very difficult and so we cannot absolutely claim that browsers don’t have RCE(s).
> That return path can be a vector
What return path could possibly lead to a RCE? That's crazy, no telemetry requires "backend could return any command that gets run on the client", you're doing telemetry in a very non-standard way if this is even possible.
At worst, the telemetry backend might first send the client a config, but none of that would contain executable commands because again, that'd be crazy.
> we cannot absolutely claim that browsers don’t have RCE(s).
Of course, you can never prove the absence of bugs (and/or security issues), but given that browsers aren't wildly exploited at this very moment, nor have been for quite some time, we can pretty confidently claim there are no browser RCEs in wide use today.
It's true that browsers have pretty big attack surface, but it's also true that it's the class of software that gets the more pentesting, since the payoff would be so great when you manage to find holes.
> What return path could possibly lead to a RCE?
API protocol says “return value is either “OK” or “ERR””, attacker sends “Floccinaucinihilipilification”, overflowing the 3-byte response buffer allocated on the stack.
Right, so you have the first step of something, but then depending on everything else, this is either a DOS or a RCE.
I'm claiming if "everything else" does indeed lead to a RCE, you're again doing something very wrong here. It's not rocket science exactly.
It’s harder nowadays, with address space layout randomization and no-execute stacks, but the basics are
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_buffer_overflow#stack_sm...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return-oriented_programming
I think that’s how lots of RCE bugs start, so it may not be rocket science, but lots of software falls for it.
I'm sorry, but I still find it hard to believe you work with other professionals that when they implement telemetry in client applications, that usually ends up exposing a RCE on the client because of the telemetry implementation.
But only these 2, only software with telemetry and web browsers. There are no RCEs in anything else…
Citation required for extraordinary claim.
> Every program which has telemetry can
I'd go out on a limb here perhaps, but I'd claim that if your telemetry means that the one SENDING the data gets a RCE by default by it, you're doing telemetry very wrong. Maybe look into different libraries/services than the ones you use today, please.
If I had to guess, without diffing old/new, it's probably related to the generative erase/ai shit.
To stack assumptions, I'd reach for something like using the recent certificate circus to present as there being an updated version of whatever model it uses on the PCs that can run it locally to give it a fucked up model that does the out of bounds shit as part of whatever verification/checks it does after its downloaded/installed.
> If I had to guess, ... > To stack assumptions, ...
So, you're saying nothing? It would have been more useful to never have posted.
Either the description or the impact is wrong. You can't trigger MS Paint in a '0-click' attack, and OOB read are not sufficient to directly obtain code execution. So I'll let you guess which one is wrong.
It's quite common with vulnerabilities found by IA, there might be less hallucination, but the impact/score is often completely wrong.
Finally MS Paint has entered the OPSEC battle royale currently being waged.
Couldn’t let Notepad keep the its title uncontested, right?
I can't wait for the Raymond Chen write up one day.
Just after I deployed a "currently patched" system yesterday and failed to uninstall Paint when I had the chance.
Normally have been 86-ing a number of annoying things such as OneDrive, but leaving Paint in place figuring it's got to still be harmless.
Creeping increases in attack vector when just the opposite is needed more than ever.
Some years ago, I ended up on a call with a support team guy, helping him under some parts of a system I worked on. He shared his screen, started drawing diagrams. It took me a whole 10 minutes to realise it was in paint, he was just that good at using it.
Turns out paint was the thing almost every customer had installed/had access to, so he worked to the lowest common denominator and got really good at using it. I guess now he'll need to find a new tool to astonish devs with.
If you're in support across multiple customers, especially in regulated industries, you learn to rely on the minimum common denominator, which usually means OS utils.
And at the end of the day $2 and $2000 screwdrivers are both still screwdrivers.
This is also why knowing the basics of "vi" is so useful on Linux/unix systems
...especially knowing how to save/exit without saving/quit, when it automatically opens up for some reason.
Before MS, there was a time where it wasn’t possible to get a virus by receiving an email. Users had to click on the attachment. Email itself is a text protocol after all.
Then they added automatic HTML parsing of incoming emails, and the attackers cheered.
Email may be text-based, but parsing MIME is a pain in the ass (speaking as somebody who wrote a console-based email client.)
You can go back to mutt's parsing, and CVE-1999-0940 for an old example. But I'm sure that's only one of many.
86-ing?
It comes from working in kitchens. It means to remove something from the menu, or otherwise make it unavailable.
Also seashells.
86 seashells? I don't even know what do with the three seashells.
Greetings and salutations!
I understood that reference.
Surely a SketchySeaBeast could come up with uses for at least three seashells
Traditionally tossing excess baggage overboard when the situation gets grim enough.
Like when a previously sturdy old sailing ship starts taking on water, for instance in the 18th century and beyond.
Numerical equivalent to "deep-six."
Perhaps someone else,
once Microsoft has reinvented themselves as…security-first?
They supposedly did, that is why most stuff on Azure is now a mix of Java, C#, Go and Rust with very little C and C++.
And there is the SFI program.
However this is a Windows application, and in spite some Rust advances in WinDev, it is pretty much C and C++ turf, with Rust getting the same warm reception as .NET used to enjoy.
Guess which language is Paint written on?
Nonetheless, they are doubling down on sandboxing Windows, macOS, iOS and Android style, for quite some time, exactly to become security first as you are asking for.
I didn't know "just don't bloody add an internet access to everything" required a different language
Not asking - just saying aloud that they seem to feel the need to get ahead of sentiment (like being dev-unfriendly), and surely this one comes next.
Remember Windows Vista? Cancel or Allow?
Had to go to Microsoft Store to get the fixed version, Windows Update didn't show anything.
Windows Update and Store are slowly becoming the same, and Paint gets delivered via the store for quite some time, there was even some drama related to it.
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/rip-microsoft-pai...
Ugh so I have to unblock the Store in my firewall just to get patched. What a PITA.
or block ms paint aswell.
Did the same and it quickly updated itself when I went into the "Paint" page (but I had to go there first). No indication of what just happened a few seconds later.
I did the same, then ran:
Get-AppxPackage -Name Microsoft.Paint | Select-Object Name, Version
But I can only get Microsoft.Paint 11.2609.401.0 and Microsoft has said different things in different places, so it's not even clear if this has the fix or not.
This article has more info on the confusion they're causing: https://windowsforum.com/news/cve-2026-83844-windows-11-pain...
why get package after something that is obviously a malicious backdoor?
If I still mamaged any windows host, i would be deploying a remove-package script asap to the entire fleet.
Get-AppxPackage gives you the currently-installed packages for a Windows profile in PowerShell. It does not, in fact, download or install anything.
The whole command I gave gives you the currently installed version of MS Paint so you can see if you're already vulnerable or not.
What kind of nonsense are you writing here right now? When the next Linux kernel CVE happens, you'll also delete all the kernels from your fleete because they're a malicious backdoor?
When did y'all stop using some basic sense before writing? -_-
Maybe we can blame PowerShell a bit for confusing names on this one. Get-AppxPackage does not download or install anything, contrary to what one might wrongly assume.
Great time to jump to the openbsd kernel!
>When did y'all stop using some basic sense before writing? -_-
Yeah samesame:
-Compares a kernel with paint
-Uses a program with telemetry/spyware instead of installing on of the 1000s alternatives
It's a built-in tool of the OS, not some random spyware. Stop with the bizarre hyperbole.
>It's a built-in tool of the OS, not some random spyware
Oh no dont get me wrong, it's definitely not some random spyware, it's deliberately made by Microsoft targeted at Windows Users who cant buy a Enterprise License.
If MS knew it would drive people to actually use their app store, they would have created the CVE themselves.
They kinda did.
For a split second, I visualized you walking into a brick and mortar Microsoft Store to get your security update done on your laptop, and somewhere in the middle of that split second I caught myself thinking „typical Microsoft“, and then I came to my senses.
For some reason, I had the same idea.
You made a slip. Thats Apple you are talking about, and it actually happens.
If brick and mortar Apple stores are staffed by "Geniuses"...
Wow, what a weird confluence of events
This seems to affect only paint 11.0.0.0 up to, but not including, 11.2605.91.0. For folks like me, running a much older version, its probably safe, although its Windows so, I'm not too sure.
I'm amazed MS Paint is somehow up to version 11, let alone 11.2605 (!). I literally can't remember the last time I used it, but what are they even changing?
They've added a lot of features and it's almost like Photoshop Elements now. It has layers, general photo editing tools, an AI generator, etc.
I remember that when Paint started being funky I found a Windows XP exe and used that. I want Paint to be the graphical equivalent of hexedit.
Now that I'm on Linux, I use jspaint.app.
I still use the Paint from Windows XP, running in Wine.
I would use kolourpaint but for whatever reason overlaid GUI elements like the selection box and brush cursors leave trails on the canvas.
Fun anecdote, paint.exe crashed the other day just as I was finishing up my drawing of the tower of Babel.
Windows 11 26H2 w/ MSPaint is 10.26100.1. It's just right.
Honestly I like layers in Paint. Even pixel art programs have layers.
I remember when I was doing pixel art, there were some purists that insisted that using layers and transparency/opacity to create windows for your buildings is more or less cheating. According to them, one should manually figure out what the color palette should be for things seen through a window.
Anyway, I continued using layers and transparency/opacity. Pixel art was hard enough already for me, so I didn’t feel that it made sense to artificially make it even more difficult for myself at the time. I had enough other aspects of pixel art to work out already in order to try to get better at it.
XP era mspaint with layers is really all I want. Rudimentary image editing and drawing but with layers.
Add threshold select (magic wand), and I'll agree 100%.
They should have just hired the paint.net guy and rolled it in.
The point of paint is a tiny pixel editor. If you want layers there are better programs.
But is Windows 11 paint capable of pixel art? I'm reading that it antialiases everything.
You can draw single pixels. I'm not sure where whoever told you that got it from.
And create single-pixel images. My most used application of Paint by far is creating single-pixel PNG files to work around the fact that "solid color" is not an option for lock/login screen backgrounds.
But can you resize without antialiasing, and does pasting trigger antialiasing?
There's this https://www.windowsphoneinfo.com/threads/why-does-resizing-m... (made confusing by the next person talking about Paint 3D, a different application) and this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3991946/... (made confusing by the person being an artist and talking in peanut butter metaphors).
There's some suggestion there that shapes (including lines) are separate entities from pixels. Wikipedia references a now-deleted answers.microsoft.com version of the first question https://web.archive.org/web/20250203164656/https://answers.m... with a couple of people saying that resize is useless. Wiki also says "re-copied" images blur, which is why I wondered if that meant pasting. Also this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5673783/... a complaint that the tool for drawing pixels doesn't indicate exactly which pixel it will draw to.
I can't reproduce any of those issues. When drawing the indicator snaps to a pixel, so it's perfectly clear where it's going. When I draw a line, it's pixel-perfect when moving the control points, likewise after it finalises. And when I copy a section of the image and paste it back in, it's pixel-perfect as I move and when I finalise. There doesn't seem to be a true resize; all I seem to be able to do is change the size of the canvas, which doesn't add any kind of aliasing.
But I've only used the program for less than 5 minutes, so maybe it's configured differently?
Yes, resizing within Paint preserves pixel-level color. I just resized a single pixel dot to about 14x25 without aliasing.
I don't know why you are so concerned, but it's incredibly easy to test these questions if you really want to know.
Just like any text editor is doomed to become either Emacs or Word, so any image editor is doomed to become Photoshop.
Reminds me of Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment[^1,2]: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
[^1]: https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/zawinskis-law/
[^2]: https://www.jwz.org/hacks/
Too true. I gave up trying to fight it years ago and now write all my documents in Emacs and edit my code with Microsoft Word.
Did you miss the chance to edit your code with MS Paint as your IDE?
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mspaint+ide
Except Vim of course.
Well, there's vile for you.
I hope MS is not getting exclusive right for manufacturing spoons because I want mine to scoop up stuff like soup or ice-cream without smart features activated by elegant touch UI on the handle like cutting down trees being in the way to the grocery store to 'elevate user experience', or others. This stuffing more and more into everything and anything for the sake of shock and awe is a stupid (and dangerous) thing.
It's the last two digits of the year plus the month number. That was June 2026. It was 2504 in May 2025, and 2402 in March 2024.
>2605
>june 2026
Pretty sure it would be May?
But in either case they had 91 releases that month?
You haven't spotted that it's regularly being released the month following the revision number. (-: Because Microsoft will of course have a release pipeline that things have to go through.
They're not a positional notation. It's version 11.2605.91 recently. It was 11.2605.81 earlier this year. There was an 11.2605.71 and an 11.2605.61 before that. Last year, there was a 11.2504.451 . The year before there was a 11.2402.32 .
Microsoft's versioning systems are not 4 columns where a tick around of one increments the one before it. The easiest way to think of them is madness made for marketing purposes. (Windows NT starting at 3.1, for example.) There is some logic to it, but nowadays it's often four entirely different things jammed together, ticking around independently. Like the version of Windows, the year and month of the release, and perhaps a daily build number or some such.
Windows NT itself has a monotonically increasing build number as part of its versioning that started some time in 1992 and is currently just over 26 thousand.
Call a paleontologist, it kooks like we've found a Java developer
Maybe someone insisted to start counting month at zero.
They didn't get the right roundness from the first time. /s
The Windows 11 version is a complete rewrite.
So was the Windows 7 version
Windows 7 added ribbons to the UI. It's unlikely it was a rewrite. Just a retooling of what Vista had, which in turn what Windows XP had, which... [continue down the line until Windows 1.0].
They also added brushes and shapes, they might have rewritten it at that point.
They added AI.
You can't have finished software any more. It's now illegal or something. Must keep changing things forever. And must add some AI features of course, to make the VCs happy.
it seems to be the same version/build as the whole system
Ads, subscriptions, AI
Did you noticed the round buttons lately ?
This was my observation too; I assume 11.0.0.0 is windows 11? because my windows 10 mspaint doesn't even match that numbering format.
yes that is my exact situation. I think (hope?) Microsoft would've disclosed it if prior versions were affected too, although I never heard the "old" paint have anything to do with network, so there's that.
My version shows "22H2" I don't know if I'm vulnerable or not
That is Windows version. But you probably use the regular Win32 Paint, so should be okay.
> I don't know if I'm vulnerable or not
Are you using Windows? If so, then yes.
Or if you're using Linux. Or OSX. seL4 users are safe though, mostly because their computers don't do anything useful.
I hope I can use this to embed a functioning Piet interpreter into Paint so it can execute arbitrary programs that I draw.
For people who don't know: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet
WHY ON HELL paint has a remote code execution in the name of God? WHY? is this because someone who needs to build a CV decided to network something on ..... I can't come with a reason why "An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network." will cause paint to start being nice to an attacker and leaking crypto secrets etc.. the thing says sending a specially crafted packet.. this means windows is part of the attack vector, but that just makes the WHY bigger, really, why?
>I can't come with a reason why "An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network."
The Microsoft link doesn't mention this at all, so my guess it's "remote" in the sense that a zip file exploit is "remote"
It absolutely does, in the "FAQ" section:
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
> How could an attacker exploit this vulnerability?
> An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to execute code on the target system. No authentication or user interaction is required..
Paint now has Copilot features that require sign-in, so presumably involve network access.
Put it on a file share and now any file is "remote".
Remote, and inapplicable. One of the very few things the Microsoft link does mention that no user interaction is required. A banana left out in the walkway still requires the user to go for a walk.
> A banana left out in the walkway still requires the user to go for a walk.
This is some Eric-Cantona-level gnomic mysticism. I approve.
[flagged]
Any extraction of behavioural surplus is a win, Nadella went hard on this in Windows 11. If you are drawing something for your child in paint, you might want to buy pampers or something.
my first reaction was "oh_ why??!?, not again_"
not sure if the last time was also a RCE specifically, but this by far isn't the first "this shouldn't even be remotely possible" CVE in MS Paint
Windows Subsystem for Paint, coming to a theater near you
Management demanded "put copilot on it!" and someone did is my guess.
Could also be some kind of recall feature.
NSA backdoor?
unlikely
IFF there is a NSA backdoor it likely would be:
- not in paint, but something you can't disable/remove in hardened special purpose windows setups
- not be easily usable by 3rd parties, like some auth accidentally accepting some quite specific other password (e.g. due to some bug reading the expected hash from the wrong place) or similar
lets not forget as much as the NSA might want to spy on you they also want to keep China/Russia out of spying on US companies. A traditional RCE in paint is very counter productive for that.
unless they actively work with MS to keep their backdoor fresh, one can reasonably assume a potential backdoor _was_ well-hidden and advanced for the time period when it was introduced. What about after 20 years and LLMs decompiling everything?
Why hide blatant doors when they’re readily available?
They (and other governments) can do multiple things at the same time.
One one hand they can actively try to work with companies to get secret back doors put in, sure. But I imagine that's not usually very successful. Lavabit chose to go out of business instead of doing so... I wonder who else is out there that we don't know about.
But we also have evidence that they actively look for, buy, and hoard, unknown (to the vendor) exploits for their own possible later use in case they need it for something.
I'm sure you can imagine that it's much more advantageous to keep collecting all kinds of different ways to get into a system in case one method is not applicable for any number of reasons.
I believe they're already quite happy with the Windows OS itself for this purpose, and probably some other firmware-level rootkits across many products like Intel and Qualcomm chipsets. Their contracts with Meta might be helpful too.
Et tu, Paint?
llm they use to vibe-code windows was supposed to make no mistakes and make everything secure...
unfortunately it made some mistakes and didn't make everything secure.
im sure windows security will get better as models get better...
maybe in six months when we have AGI... . . .
AGI will realize that creating critical exploit vectors only to discover and fix them later will only make it seem more relevant and important.
Paint opens a port?
Yes, when it launches, it opens a telnet server so that bill gates can log in and type all the colors for you to use, like #000000, #000001, etc
Presumably as part of the generative AI stuff they crammed into it? They've been hilariously cagey about the details here which makes me think it has to be AI-feature related
Not sure what you think is "hilariously cagey", but why would they only be "cagey" if the bug was from ai-features? Also it says paint versions are "affected from 11.0.0.0 before 11.2605.91.0" which I take to mean the bug has been there since Windows 11 was released in 2021
What Network?
It's probably a way to get phished, if you click on a malicious bmp file.
MSRC[1] says otherwise:
> An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to execute code on the target system. No authentication or user interaction is required.
[1] https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
I don't know anyone running Paint servers and I'm pretty sure phishing could be possible.
It's bizarre that you're doubling down in the face of statements from Microsoft's security experts who have the full context of the investigation and the source code. It's worth some self-reflection on what drove you to make this post.
The boilerplate FAQ text is frequently wrong or incomplete. You can go through the catalog and look through some of them and see how many have multiple revisions. I think, if you want to know definitively, you have to patch diff it
Where does it say that you can't be phished with a bmp file?
Maybe you should self-reflect on why you are offended by my comment. You might learn something about yourself.
It says that "no user interaction is required", so phishing is explicitly not what this vulnerability is about.
You haven't declared any privileged knowledge of this attack or MS Paint and have, on vibes, doubled down on what you assume must be going on despite other evidence.
It's a bad look.
Look away then.
You don't have to comment on other people's comments you know.
Phishing with .bmp files existed for a very long time now.
> Maybe you should self-reflect on why you are offended by my comment
A significant chunk of the world's problems today are caused by or exacerbated by people who confidently assert things they believe regardless of what evidence or experts say, and who dismiss expertise. Those people are emboldened by others allowing them to spew nonsense unchecked, and I have no interest in seeing HN degraded similarly.
You're moving goalposts. A commenter asked what Networking MS Paint had in the context of this vulnerability. You made an assertion not supported by the documentation we had, and now you're trying to claim that there could be other vulnerabilities rather than admitting that you made a mistake without doing any research.
Arguing on the internet over these kind of things is not a very good look.
neighbouring post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50383612
wow thoses days are amazing. cve: AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
UI:N it is with no interaction ?
is it a cve mistake ?
Doesn't seem to be:
> An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to execute code on the target system. No authentication or user interaction is required.
That looks like a placeholder text they drop in the FAQ for anything tagged as RCE.
Until somebody connects the dots on how the heck MS Paint is accessible over the network, I'm gonna maintain some pretty intense skepticism here.
> https://share.google/aDP2ac9j5AmB13QRo
Okay, but then the UI:N? Without user interaction, how do you even perform an exploit in a way that doesn't qualify as remote?
Hold up.
"No User Interaction"
Does that mean that paint doesnt have to be running?
Application being installed on a PC allows a specially crafted packet to arbitrarily execute code?
I have my own (related) questions, but I do have theories, that may or may not answer;
0. My gut says this is somehow related to indexing/thumbnail rendering. But maybe I'm off base.
1. The 'no user interaction' could be related to (ironically) some background pre-indexing process that windows is doing on files inserted to folders.
1.1. LOL maybe their bullshit 'Windows Copilot' which is why the description is so vague, don't want to torpedo things worse than they already are.
2. It could also be, still in the category of 'well, ok they click on a share folder and the preview runs' or a weird edge thing.
2.1. But they aren't being that clear yet, probably because it's bad.
The advisory from Microsoft specifically says it can be exploited over the network with zero user interaction.
The vulnerability predates Copilot. Paint's first vulnerable version (11.0) was released September 2021, Copilot in February 2023.
Thumbnails make sense, because the indexer can spin it up at any point with no user interaction.
Fixed in version 11.2609.401.0.
Oh, this is the modern "paint" trash, not mspaint.exe that i still use, copied out of x64 XP build, together with calc.exe
Don't forget to grab notepad.exe too!
metapad.exe[0] by liquidninja is a much better notepad replacement IMO. Obviously I am excluding the heavyweight options like Notepad++, Sublime, etc.
[0]: https://liquidninja.com/metapad/download.html
At the moment I just use Zed, or I imagine I'd be fine with Sublime. When I used Jetbrains/VSCode, I would grab Notepad/Notepad++ when I didn't want to wait for them to open, set up a project, etc. But if something 'heavyweight' is quicker than notepad, and the features don't get in my way, I don't need anything else. In fact I still appreciate the extra functionality with those one-off text/data/scripts - format, regex replace, diff, occasionally even LSP like shellcheck
Metapad was formed and updated in 2021ish. https://github.com/sobitcorp/metapad
Didn't notepad get a CVE recently too?
mspaint.exe is quite likely to have at least one code execution vulnerability if one opens a malicious file, but I bet it's very safe against remote attack :)
This is the equivalent of "I don't watch TV" comments about media problems.
Good for you.
Now only <all Windows users>-1 are affected.
reminds me of https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-3246-1
>Exploit Code Maturity
>Unproven
>Remediation Level
>Official Fix
>Report Confidence
>Confirmed
I really like these secondary scoring factors, not just scoring the vuln itself, but how it's being attacked.
Of course.
Is this old or new paint
Just take the lid off and let is sit for a week.
hardened paint, when you lend a security researcher your paint.
LLMs are now unfolding decades of technical debt, poorly written code, and security vulnerabilities accumulated in software built by humans.
Firearms are now exposing the inherent vulnerability of human flesh against small projectiles flying faster than the speed of sound. Before that we were just fist fighting eachother and we were trained for that. But no mo! Get your dragon's breath today at $199.99!
I understand your frustration.
From the moment I understood the vulnerability of my human flesh it disgusted me.
That's one way to read it.
My take is that the addition of CoPilot to MS Paint is probably how this CVE got introduced.
The CVE was introduced over a year before that.
this is just one case.
But it is the case you were leaving the comment on, which is why anyone reading it will assume you meant to apply it to this case.
You say that as if there aren't more just over there.
I was saying this is just one case where we can say the reason about copilot, there are dozens of reported vulnerabilities, bugs in kernel, rust. and many more elite products which were authored by so called elite developers.
You willingly let "perfect" be the enemy of "good" in this case. It's absolutely possible to build software runtimes that obviate this type of nonsense. It's not grandstanding by elite developers, most of these choices are common-sense mitigations.
--Another vulnerability in ssh accounts that should never take a password at all (root, your key-only deploy user, ldap users, the default user on alpine's aws and azure images) take any password longer than 256 characters. I guess these also belongs to your common sense mitigation category but this has been there since 2016. -- struct's lifetime requirements can be bypassed via covariant field assignment, 11 year old rust compiler bug. how about this?
Reread both of our comments. You are complaining about an LDAP bug and a Rustc issue, the sky is not falling Mr. Chicken Little.
Exactly. So the original quote should be updated to read:
> LLMs are now unfolding technical debt, poorly written code, and security vulnerabilities accumulated in software that they have created themselves.
i dont think kernel bugs , ssh bug, 12 year old rust compiler bug all was written by LLMs.
Why on Earth do you have to give Paint, internet? How is that a technical debt? Making all nice little fully offline apps Internet Nightmare Slop is wag beyond debt.
It might not be paint with internet, it might be something like a packet over your network asking a computer to open an input/file, and the computer responds by opening that malicious input with paint
Yes, its related to a image file, where parsing a specially crafted image file causes the program to read outside its designated memory buffer
And yet suggesting C++ should focus more on memory safety just gets downvoted instead... I swear sometimes it's like being a crab in a barrel.
is this as bad as Windows Metafile (WMF) Exploit?
with the limited available information it looks a few _magnitudes_ worse :(
Wow! At first sight I was sure it was a joke, but no. What a time...
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
Presumably this is like many other graphics tool vulnerabilities this works by the attacker persuading a user to open a file that exercises the bug. Not terribly unusual.
I don't think so:
> User Interaction: None
> Out-of-bounds read in Windows Paint allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network.
> An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network.
What server is MS Paint running or what services does it provide?
Edit: Apparently you can use it to print an image from the command-line. Is that how this is being exploited?
MS Paint has Copilot now
Does that turn it into a server or service?
I'm no expert but so much of Windows is implemented as services. svchost.exe is probably involved somehow. Like it wouldn't surprise me if Copilot is implemented as a service and it talks to Paint via IPC messages or something
But that alone wouldn't make the service listen on the network, even if it were the case.
It would make sense that it could listen for messages like "your generated image is ready!" and pass bitmap data to Paint. And media like images are a common source of vulnerabilities since you're basically passing binary data into the software.
IIS (Internet Impasto Server)
This site doesn't do jokes
At least not about serious security matters
This site absolutely does jokes, it just doesn't beat horses into bloody pulps with the jokes the way reddit does. We have a higher standard. A joke has to actually be funny, and not some tired reference.
Except for the infamous Dropbox comment.
Post a thread including the number "42" in the title, and you'll be proven wrong in the first 3 comments.
Not to imply any particular comparison to less serious websites where the karma system over time may have resulted in a disproportionate surplus of one liner jokes and other spammy low quality posts.
When they find a CVE RCE in minesweeper then you know it’s all over
Does windows even have minesweeper anymore
Yes, and it's 200+ MB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40647278
Still able to happily play rounds of Minesweeper on my 286-16!
Not out of the box.
Turns out we were sweeping for CVEs, not mines, all along
Of course the valuable link is down-weighted/buried in the HN discussion...
Tangential, but: "We're sorry but the CVE Website doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled."
Usually I just enable JS. But is this a security site, asking for remote code execution on my device? Before they can show me some text? They just disqualified themselves.
I'm just in full denial that paint runs a server. Happy to be corrected if someone has a windows machine handy to verify.
But From [0]: > A total of 59 of the October CVEs fit my definition of wormable. Specifically, 57 contain both “An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network” and “No authentication or user interaction is required.”
Makes you wonder if MS is just copy-pasting boilerplate on CVEs and disclosed incorrectly the scope of the one in Paint because they had 56 other bugs to disclose.
So I'm not discounting reporting human error here, yet.
[0] https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2026/10/13/the-octobe...
Code execution, sure, paint has been used to write executable code too, so why not.
But remote? How
"An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to execute code on the target system. No authentication or user interaction is required.."
Still, the question remains... How?
It mentions that it may rely on other services or security measures running- I wonder if there’s something like this hitting a firewall or av and then that calling out to paint to check file type or size out something like that?
It still makes it sound like the problem really is the other service that is letting a remote connection invoke some part of MS paint.
But why MS Paint? What functionality does it offer to another program to get called on specifically? And if this other service isn't calling on it specifically, what else can it be tricked into calling? And how many of those are also vulnerable to being stabbed in the back? The smaller interior holes are a problem, sure, but it seems like the CVE should be for the hull hole in that case.
Sounds like they just mean opening a file that you got from somewhere else.
>The CVSS score of 8.1 marks this as a high‑severity RCE. The EPSS score is not available, and the vulnerability is not listed in CISA’s KEV catalog. Based on the description, the likely attack vector is remote: an attacker can deliver the malicious file over a network connection, for example via Remote Desktop, file shares, or other network‑exposed services that allow users to open images. The lack of EPSS data does not diminish the threat posed by a known RCE, but it does make precise likelihood estimation difficult.
https://app.opencve.io/cve/CVE-2026-83844
That's... that's not RCE though.
Yes, it is.
Sounds like it might be automatically opening a file that was sent over the network without any user interaction.
Reading tea leaves is still reading tea leaves, even if you make an AI do it… (which is what this is, judging by other things I've seen on opencve.io)
Yeah, OpenCVE also includes this:
> After applying the update, verify that the target Windows systems are running a version that includes the CVE fix before disabling legacy file‑open processing in Paint.
Which is complete nonsense. "Legacy file-open processing" isn't a real configurable option in Paint and this seems to suggest that enabling it is some sort of mitigation. The resolution is simply to update Paint.
The direct implication is that current generations of ms paint are a “service over the network.” Probably a theoretically possible RPC end point of svchost.exe
I'm thankfully out of the loop on Windows these days, but as I remember it Paint did not have any network features? Is that still true? If if is, maybe it is a misfiling of the CVE and it isn't remote?
Or are they chaining a browser auto opening a download in paint, (but browsers shouldn't do that)...
If they know what you paint/edit, they can sell you ads better
These days paint has copilot...
Why for the love of everything that is good does MS Paint have network trash in it. It's a super simple bitmap editor. Like Notepad, it's simple and just works.
Make a new product and bundle that as an option if you want to drastically change the functionality.
Hate to break it to you..
> Notepad in Windows includes AI features powered by Copilot that help refine and shorten text with the assistance of GPT. By default, these AI features are enabled on managed devices
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/...
> Like Notepad, it's simple and just works.
I mean… what else were the people working on Notepad and Paint to do!?
The order came down to integrate AI, and they wanted to be promoted.
Every single day I’m happier and happier than I use Linux now.
Some distro will default to integrating an AI into bash any day now. It's only a matter of time till less and vim have AI search.
There are certainly many options to choose from: https://gist.github.com/ColinKennedy/8a0eea1b18b6e22bc10daa6...
I've asked Claude to review top candidates from https://github.com/ColinKennedy/neovim-ai-plugins
Luckily with OSS we can fork it
This is the only network feature paint has iirc, so that's probably it.
It's the only network feature I can think of, but what is it doing opening a port to wait and listen for anything?
I wonder if it could be through a file:// or some deeplink custom url handler that opens in Paint and clicking on it with some carefully crafted file path could make it read out of bounds (since that's the associated weakness reported) and execute something.
Whatever it is, it doesn't require any clicking or user interaction. Maybe my imagination is just limited but I can't imagine why Paint is making itself available for incoming traffic on the network.
Ah, no interaction. Yikes, doesn't make sense Paint would have a server tho.
Should be easy to verify for someone with a windows machine if it does.
Mine doesn't have a mouse or keyboard at the moment, so I'm only checking over an SSH->WSL connection. But it sure doesn't look like it's opening any ports from here.
So I guess either some random OS component is listening to the network and just-as-inexplicably asking Paint to do something for it. Or one of Paint's outbound connections is vulnerable if hijacked by a mitm. Network interception's one of the examples used for the "High" Attack Complexity rating that MS gave this CVE. Maybe powered by eMudhra for any systems that haven't revoked those certs? That'd be topical.
But still wouldn't really make sense. A patch for machines that are actively updating Paint but dodging cert revocations? Nothing really makes sense about this silly Paint CVE.
Maybe because a .bmp file could be sent remotely.
Or maybe after the .bmp file is executed, it can install something that opens an outbound TCP connection to its C2, and thus can receive commands. Would not need admin privileges because it doesn't open a port, just 'outbound' connections, like a long-poll.
Sending a BMP file that the user has to open doesn't match what little published details we have:
> The vulnerable system can be exploited without any interaction from any user.
you are right, it seems like the latter outbouns tcp connection is already being opened by paint, and that is what is exploitable.
since it exposes no port, I’d assume it isn’t trivial to exploit, paint will chose its target (a microsoft domain or IP), the exploit must involve some error in destination selection, or simply allowing a mitm to impersonate microsoft.
this is inline with Attack Complexity High, attacker needs to be either in the network path (mitm) or control the erroneous destination of the connection (say mircosoft.com), possibly blocking (dosing) the higher priority genuine destination
Seems odd even for a vibecoded copilot integration to make repeated, unprompted network requests. And if they're not repeated and unprompted, then we don't meet the "no user input" requirement.
pretty standard to check for updates no?
For others, def. For paint, it's always been either OS-updated or store-updated.
Because the definition of "remote" has been expanded in the name of resume-driven development to include sending a malicious file that a victim has to open.
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
States:
> Attack Vector: Network
> The vulnerable component is bound to the network stack and the set of possible attackers extends beyond the other options listed, up to and including the entire Internet.
The way I read it is MSPaint is now running as a service and listens to a port (while running? all the time?) and you can trigger remote execute by sending data. Just.. Why?..
Looking forward to the CALC.EXE RCE next, so we can pop calc while we pop calc!
Orange Tsai almost did that last week where he used calc to pop Edge [0] to reverse the chain where edge popped calc
[0] https://x.com/orange_8361/status/2115654643141489057?a=qallN...
Wow, I had totally forgotten about that tradition.
At this point I want to declare that air-gapped network with the transfer only over USB drives is a viable and valuable method of handling IT security. Outside transfer only happens by people manually copying text onto a floppy and reading it from a floppy.
I just... It's just ridiculous at this point.
yes and noone does this anymore, because the internet was just convenient.
First the notepad CVE and now this, Microsoft is on a roll.
Waiting for the 0day RCE in Solitaire next...
Hate to think what Minesweeper has in store.
The results will be explosive.
Given the amount of ads it shows, all you need is to find a bug in EdgeView, and get them to load your ad.
I sooo want to wrangle in a joke about minesweeper being coNP-complete, somehow
I love Microsoft! Who else might look at a fully offline drawing app and think: "Man this needs the most severe level of networking access capable of remote code execution", and that surely is to put their useless Copilot to absolutely nowhere. Next headline will be "All user credentials stolen from Notepad"
What's next, the space cadet pinball game lol... although jokes on them, I would only play it if I didn't have internet.
Does MS Paint have network connections? This is sick.
Each time I learn something new about Microslop, I'm just glad I'm not a tenant.
The calendar app and my internal clock disagree, is it April 1 today or no?
Finally my childhood abstract Paint art can take over a server
mspaint, remote code execution vulnerability. Dear gosh nothing is sacred.
Do notepad next, haha
Patch your MS Paint, everybody!
What patch do I need to draw?
Cross hatch, Scottish tartan?
Well this is Microsoft Windows so... argyle?
I miss when MS Paint just opened image files and let you do some basic editing, before layers, background removal and RCE's...
Does this effect the regular Win32 Paint? Who uses the app store crap anyway?
why does PAINT of all apps need to do something with the network? telemetry? AI? both?
Great, now I have to go and update all my software that depends on MS Paint. There goes my weekend.
Yep, AI gonna end all software and we come back to air gapped system
If ain't broke don't fix it! Why did they change MS Paint! The campy memes will never be the same.
Paint XP was the best
I guess it's time to finally bite the bullet and migrate to jspaint.
This is absurd.
Lol. Cue the "not like this" memes.
Thy F'd up again! Wish I had a tracker for all of microsoft's mistakes... oh wait, I already made one! haha