We seriously need more information.
MS Paint Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (cve.org)
648 pointsby kuberwastaken19 hours ago243 comments
pasteleft 14 hours ago
Paint can exectue arbitrary code from the REMOTE, without USER INTERACTION?????
hulitu 10 hours ago
Every program which has telemetry can. And web browsers.
weavie 5 hours ago
How?
embedding-shape 3 hours ago
> 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.
port11 2 hours ago
But only these 2, only software with telemetry and web browsers. There are no RCEs in anything else…
IAmBroom 2 hours ago
Citation required for extraordinary claim.
joshspankit an hour ago
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).
embedding-shape an hour ago
> 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.
Someone 35 minutes ago
> 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.
monster_truck 9 hours ago
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.
_notreallyme_ 4 hours ago
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.
boringg an hour ago
Finally MS Paint has entered the OPSEC battle royale currently being waged.
sharpshadow an hour ago
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.
Oarch 18 hours ago
I can't wait for the Raymond Chen write up one day.
fuzzfactor 16 hours ago
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.
znpy 7 hours ago
86-ing?
yakshaving_jgt 7 hours ago
It comes from working in kitchens. It means to remove something from the menu, or otherwise make it unavailable.
dboreham 3 hours ago
Also seashells.
SketchySeaBeast 3 hours ago
86 seashells? I don't even know what do with the three seashells.
zdragnar an hour ago
Surely a SketchySeaBeast could come up with uses for at least three seashells
onei 6 hours ago
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.
ethbr1 4 hours ago
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.
joshspankit an hour ago
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.
stevekemp an hour ago
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.
DANmode 9 hours ago
Perhaps someone else,
once Microsoft has reinvented themselves as…security-first?
pjmlp 8 hours ago
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.
vaylian 6 hours ago
Remember Windows Vista? Cancel or Allow?
greyhound1 18 hours ago
Had to go to Microsoft Store to get the fixed version, Windows Update didn't show anything.
neuroelectron 17 hours ago
Wow, what a weird confluence of events
pixelpoet 16 hours ago
If MS knew it would drive people to actually use their app store, they would have created the CVE themselves.
nik282000 2 hours ago
They kinda did.
gadrev 16 hours ago
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.
ManuelKiessling 15 hours ago
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.
supriyo-biswas 11 hours ago
For some reason, I had the same idea.
alt227 6 hours ago
You made a slip. Thats Apple you are talking about, and it actually happens.
IAmBroom 2 hours ago
If brick and mortar Apple stores are staffed by "Geniuses"...
lossyalgo 14 hours ago
Ugh so I have to unblock the Store in my firewall just to get patched. What a PITA.
aDyslecticCrow an hour ago
or block ms paint aswell.
Natsu 11 hours ago
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...
iririririr 11 hours ago
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.
izacus 8 hours ago
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? -_-
BSDobelix 7 hours ago
>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
izacus 5 hours ago
It's a built-in tool of the OS, not some random spyware. Stop with the bizarre hyperbole.
BSDobelix 4 hours ago
>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.
trashb 5 hours ago
Great time to jump to the openbsd kernel!
pjmlp 7 hours ago
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...
everylostbit 18 hours ago
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.
Kapura 16 hours ago
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.
everylostbit 16 hours ago
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.
tjohns 16 hours ago
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?
StilesCrisis 16 hours ago
The Windows 11 version is a complete rewrite.
CursedSilicon 16 hours ago
So was the Windows 7 version
chungy 13 hours ago
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].
Kwpolska 8 hours ago
They also added brushes and shapes, they might have rewritten it at that point.
jval43 16 hours ago
They added AI.
Legend2440 16 hours ago
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.
anal_reactor 15 hours ago
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.
WarOnPrivacy 11 hours ago
Windows 11 26H2 w/ MSPaint is 10.26100.1. It's just right.
boomlinde 8 hours ago
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.
bombcar 15 hours ago
Just like any text editor is doomed to become either Emacs or Word, so any image editor is doomed to become Photoshop.
wilkystyle 14 hours ago
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.
jodrellblank 12 hours ago
Did you miss the chance to edit your code with MS Paint as your IDE?
echion 12 hours ago
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/
sam345 11 hours ago
Except Vim of course.
eru 4 hours ago
Well, there's vile for you.
pasteleft 14 hours ago
Honestly I like layers in Paint. Even pixel art programs have layers.
QuantumNomad_ 9 hours ago
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.
card_zero 4 hours ago
But is Windows 11 paint capable of pixel art? I'm reading that it antialiases everything.
Measter 3 hours ago
You can draw single pixels. I'm not sure where whoever told you that got it from.
card_zero 3 hours ago
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.
rkachowski 3 hours ago
XP era mspaint with layers is really all I want. Rudimentary image editing and drawing but with layers.
mihaaly 3 hours ago
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.
JdeBP 15 hours ago
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.
what 14 hours ago
>2605
>june 2026
Pretty sure it would be May?
But in either case they had 91 releases that month?
gnabgib 14 hours ago
Call a paleontologist, it kooks like we've found a Java developer
Rexxar 14 hours ago
Maybe someone insisted to start counting month at zero.
JdeBP 13 hours ago
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.
hulitu 10 hours ago
They didn't get the right roundness from the first time. /s
HoldOnAMinute 12 hours ago
Ads, subscriptions, AI
sznio 10 hours ago
it seems to be the same version/build as the whole system
hulitu 10 hours ago
Did you noticed the round buttons lately ?
grishka 7 hours ago
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.
novia 15 hours ago
My version shows "22H2" I don't know if I'm vulnerable or not
lossyalgo 14 hours ago
> I don't know if I'm vulnerable or not
Are you using Windows? If so, then yes.
cowlevel 12 hours ago
Or if you're using Linux. Or OSX. seL4 users are safe though, mostly because their computers don't do anything useful.
durmusk 11 hours ago
That is Windows version. But you probably use the regular Win32 Paint, so should be okay.
sunrunner an hour ago
I hope I can use this to embed a functioning Piet interpreter into Paint so it can execute arbitrary programs that I draw.
xlayn 16 hours ago
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?
novia 15 hours ago
NSA backdoor?
dathinab 15 hours ago
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.
BowBun 14 hours ago
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?
DANmode 9 hours ago
Why hide blatant doors when they’re readily available?
ranger_danger 10 hours ago
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.
jimt1234 15 hours ago
Et tu, Paint?
goodcitizen 5 hours ago
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.
dathinab 15 hours ago
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
charlieyu1 15 hours ago
[flagged]
gruez 15 hours ago
>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"
doubled112 14 hours ago
Put it on a file share and now any file is "remote".
jdiff 13 hours ago
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.
dofm 11 hours ago
> 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.
simiones 11 minutes ago
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..
augment_me 14 hours ago
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.
gloosx 12 hours ago
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... . . .
boomlinde 7 hours ago
AGI will realize that creating critical exploit vectors only to discover and fix them later will only make it seem more relevant and important.
tomkarho 9 hours ago
Management demanded "put copilot on it!" and someone did is my guess.
Could also be some kind of recall feature.
lmc 8 hours ago
Windows Subsystem for Paint, coming to a theater near you
what_hn 17 hours ago
Paint opens a port?
matt123456789 15 hours ago
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
mattstir 2 hours ago
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
sigmar 2 hours ago
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
ajasmin 18 hours ago
What Network?
hoppp 18 hours ago
It's probably a way to get phished, if you click on a malicious bmp file.
Arainach 17 hours ago
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...
hoppp 3 hours ago
I don't know anyone running Paint servers and I'm pretty sure phishing could be possible.
dmitrygr 17 hours ago
Oh, this is the modern "paint" trash, not mspaint.exe that i still use, copied out of x64 XP build, together with calc.exe
jasonjayr 16 hours ago
Don't forget to grab notepad.exe too!
caspar 13 hours ago
metapad.exe[0] by liquidninja is a much better notepad replacement IMO. Obviously I am excluding the heavyweight options like Notepad++, Sublime, etc.
speedstyle 2 hours ago
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
nik282000 2 hours ago
Didn't notepad get a CVE recently too?
amluto 15 hours ago
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 :)
IAmBroom 2 hours ago
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.
layer8 19 hours ago
Fixed in version 11.2609.401.0.
protocolture 13 hours ago
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?
to11mtm 13 hours ago
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.
IAmBroom 2 hours ago
The vulnerability predates Copilot. Paint's first vulnerable version (11.0) was released September 2021, Copilot in February 2023.
NooneAtAll5 17 hours ago
neighbouring post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50383612
patrick_rtk 18 hours ago
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 ?
jdiff 17 hours ago
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.
akerl_ 14 hours ago
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.
jdiff 12 hours ago
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?
sadsunshower 13 hours ago
reminds me of https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-3246-1
TZubiri 19 hours ago
>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.
sreekanth850 14 hours ago
LLMs are now unfolding decades of technical debt, poorly written code, and security vulnerabilities accumulated in software built by humans.
CivBase 13 hours ago
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.
sreekanth850 13 hours ago
this is just one case.
jdiff 12 hours ago
You say that as if there aren't more just over there.
sreekanth850 11 hours ago
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.
bigyabai 8 hours ago
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.
sreekanth850 8 hours ago
--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?
bigstrat2003 10 hours ago
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.
imp0cat 10 hours ago
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.
sreekanth850 10 hours ago
i dont think kernel bugs , ssh bug, 12 year old rust compiler bug all was written by LLMs.
IAmBroom an hour ago
The CVE was introduced over a year before that.
pmkary 10 hours ago
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.
infinite_spin 10 hours ago
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
sreekanth850 3 hours ago
Yes, its related to a image file, where parsing a specially crafted image file causes the program to read outside its designated memory buffer
ranger_danger 10 hours ago
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.
MarchApril 8 hours ago
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!
sreekanth850 8 hours ago
I understand your frustration.
mock-possum 7 hours ago
From the moment I understood the vulnerability of my human flesh it disgusted me.
Razengan 14 hours ago
Of course.
darepublic 15 hours ago
Is this old or new paint
tclancy 13 hours ago
Just take the lid off and let is sit for a week.
trashb 5 hours ago
hardened paint, when you lend a security researcher your paint.
paulpauper 17 hours ago
is this as bad as Windows Metafile (WMF) Exploit?
dathinab 15 hours ago
with the limited available information it looks a few _magnitudes_ worse :(
falcor84 19 hours ago
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...
dboreham 19 hours ago
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.
yread 19 hours ago
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.
criddell 19 hours ago
> 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?
lakeviewterrace 19 hours ago
IIS (Internet Impasto Server)
80fj0348i 18 hours ago
MS Paint has Copilot now
criddell 18 hours ago
Does that turn it into a server or service?
80fj0348i 18 hours ago
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
steve1977 17 hours ago
But that alone wouldn't make the service listen on the network, even if it were the case.
80fj0348i 15 hours ago
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.
stygiansonic 19 hours ago
When they find a CVE RCE in minesweeper then you know it’s all over
linux2647 18 hours ago
Turns out we were sweeping for CVEs, not mines, all along
mhh__ 18 hours ago
Does windows even have minesweeper anymore
kibwen 17 hours ago
Yes, and it's 200+ MB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40647278
accrual 17 hours ago
Still able to happily play rounds of Minesweeper on my 286-16!
steve1977 17 hours ago
Not out of the box.
lakeviewterrace 18 hours ago
Of course the valuable link is down-weighted/buried in the HN discussion...
>Publicly disclosed
>No
>Exploited
>No
>Exploitability assessment
>Exploitation Less Likelydist-epoch 18 hours ago
This site doesn't do jokes
knottn 17 hours ago
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.
wolttam 16 hours ago
At least not about serious security matters
Sohcahtoa82 16 hours ago
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.
Matumio 10 hours ago
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.
6thbit 16 hours ago
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...
tosti 19 hours ago
Code execution, sure, paint has been used to write executable code too, so why not.
But remote? How
VorpalWay 19 hours ago
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)...
kuboble 19 hours ago
These days paint has copilot...
robotnikman 19 hours ago
This is the only network feature paint has iirc, so that's probably it.
jdiff 16 hours ago
It's the only network feature I can think of, but what is it doing opening a port to wait and listen for anything?
radicalbyte 18 hours ago
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.
waz0wski 18 hours ago
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/...
SV_BubbleTime 18 hours ago
> 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.
angry_octet 17 hours ago
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.
zbentley 17 hours ago
There are certainly many options to choose from: https://gist.github.com/ColinKennedy/8a0eea1b18b6e22bc10daa6...
reorder9695 6 hours ago
Luckily with OSS we can fork it
augment_me 14 hours ago
If they know what you paint/edit, they can sell you ads better
gregschlom 19 hours ago
"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?
nonethewiser 19 hours ago
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.
autoexec 18 hours ago
Sounds like it might be automatically opening a file that was sent over the network without any user interaction.
advisedwang 18 hours ago
That's... that's not RCE though.
eqvinox 18 hours ago
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)
jdiff 15 hours ago
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.
IanCal 19 hours ago
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?
Den_VR 19 hours ago
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
zmmmmm 16 hours ago
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.
jdiff 12 hours ago
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.
TZubiri 19 hours ago
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.
jdiff 16 hours ago
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.
TZubiri 14 hours ago
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
jdiff 13 hours ago
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.
TZubiri 5 hours ago
pretty standard to check for updates no?
Sohcahtoa82 18 hours ago
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.
6thbit 16 hours ago
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.
jdiff 16 hours ago
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.
6thbit 16 hours ago
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.
jdiff 12 hours ago
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.
drillsteps5 12 hours ago
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?..
IFC_LLC 15 hours ago
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.
fock 10 hours ago
yes and noone does this anymore, because the internet was just convenient.