Thanks to Microsoft adding all those extra features to Notepad, it now unfortunately sports one more: An exploitation vulnerability with a high security rating

A screenshot of Windows Notepad, demonstrating the use of tables, as created by Microsoft.

For over four decades, Windows Notepad has been the basic text editor of choice for many a discerning PC user. In recent years, though, Microsoft has been steadily adding all kinds of features to it, turning it from a barebones word processor into something decidedly more complex. Unfortunately, the addition of formatting and tables now includes one more feature: a remote code execution vulnerability that could let hackers run all kinds of nasty stuff on your PC.

Microsoft acknowledges the issue in its security update guide, snappily labelled as CVE-2026-20841. With a common vulnerability base score of 8.8 and temporal score of 7.7, it's rated as a 'high' security problem.