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Notepad++ Hijacked by State-Sponsored Hackers (notepad-plus-plus.org)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 95 points 6 months ago (1 child)

From my understanding: Basically the attackers could reply to your version check request (usually done automatically) and tell N++ that there were a new version available. If you then approved the update dialogue, N++ would download and execute the binary from the update link that the server sent you. But this didn't necessarily need to be a real update, it could have been any binary since neither the answer to the update check nor the download link were verified by N++

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  • [–] 16 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    Thats what i was thinking, but there is no mention on if this did happen and if it did what was compromised or allowed to happen.

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  • [–] 19 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    How would n++ devs know?

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  • [–] 28 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Expanding on this: the exploit was against their domain name, redirecting selected update requests away from the notepad++ servers. The software itself didn't validate that the domain actually points to notepad++ servers, and the notepad++ update servers would not see any information that would tell them what was happening.

    Likely they picked some specific developers with a known public IP, and only used this to inject those specific people with malware.

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  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    So the solution would have been an SSL certificate check on the client side.

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Can't tell if that would have helped

    which could have allowed the malicious actors to redirect some of the traffic going to https://notepad-plus-plus.org/getDownloadUrl.php to their own servers

    They could have just piped the binaries though the same server since they had this level of access. They would have had months to figure it out.

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  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Oof, I thought it was just a DNS hijack. If they had access to the server, it's game over regardless.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)

    It's not game over regardless if the updater checks a signature of the update installer. Then it wouldn't run an installer by someone else.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    That's true, assuming they didn't also put their private keys on the server

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago

    As the hoster wrote this:

    we immediately transferred all clients’ web hosting subscriptions from this server

    It looks like the binaries and the update check script were put on a simple web space. If that is the correct conclusion to draw from this excerpt, then it'd be rather strange to have the keys on that server as it's very unlikely that it was used to produce any builds.

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago

    That's what they say they rolled out, after: "Within Notepad++ itself, WinGup (the updater) was enhanced in v8.8.9 to verify both the certificate and the signature of the downloaded installer"

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