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Notepad++ Hijacked by State-Sponsored Hackers (notepad-plus-plus.org)

submitted 1 day ago by who@feddit.org to c/programming@programming.dev

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 33 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

The incident began from June 2025. Multiple independaent security researchers have assessed that the threat acotor is likely a Chinese state-sponsored group, which would explain the highly selective targeting obseved during the campaign.

I do kind of wonder about the emacs package management infrastructure system. Like, if attacking things that text editors use online is an actively-used vector.

[–] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 5 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Someone almost managed to inject a vulnerability into the source code for sshd. They planned it for years, and it was only caught because someone noticed unusually high network traffic. Any vulnerability into a core package like that could be massive. Notepad++ is a little smaller, but this is still one of the bigger hacks of the decade.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 9 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Someone almost managed to inject a vulnerability into the source code for sshd.

You're probably thinking of the Jia Tan attack on xz; because of a distro patch in Debian, code in xz had the ability to affect sshd. The changes weren't actually to the sshd source, but trying to use an obscure route to affect sshd.

[–] Piatro@programming.dev 14 points 1 day ago

Text editors with plugin support as potential vectors of malware is a pretty well known problem. It's why at the very least organisations should be auditing the plugins used and actively monitoring them.

[–] samc@feddit.uk 6 points 1 day ago

Well now I'm nervous! My first instinct though is that the vast majority of Emacs packages are plain elisp, and Emacs users have a habit of cracking open and tinkering with their packages, so any malicious code ought to be spotted quickly.

With the native compiled modules however, it could be another story...