Notepad RCE vulnerability CVE-2026-20841 explained. How a text editor became a remote code execution vector. What you need to know.

Remember when Notepad was just… Notepad? A simple text editor nobody asked to be modernized?

Yeah, Microsoft didn’t care either. They bolted on Markdown support and AI features anyway. And now we’ve got CVE-2026-20841. Remote code execution. Via a text file. This is the kind of thing that makes you go “oh come on, really?”