What is CVE-2026-38972?
Notepad3 through 6.25.822.1 contains a DLL search-order hijacking vulnerability in the About-dialog code path in src/Notepad3.c. The application calls LoadLibrary(L"MSFTEDIT.DLL") with a bare DLL name, which allows a local attacker to place a malicious MSFTEDIT.DLL in the application directory or another preferred DLL search location and achieve arbitrary code execution in the context of the user when the About dialog is opened.
The identifier was first published 95 days ago.
Severity and exploitation probability
- CISA KEV
- Not listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog
- Published
- 2026-07-02
Is CVE-2026-38972 being exploited?
It currently carries a trending score of 30 in the Threadlinqs vulnerability feed.
Affected products and versions
No affected-product or package list has been recorded for CVE-2026-38972 in the tracked sources. The vendor advisory and the references below are the authoritative statement of what is affected.
How to fix CVE-2026-38972
No vendor patch reference has been recorded for CVE-2026-38972 in the tracked sources. Follow the references below for a fix, and treat any affected deployment as exposed until the vendor states otherwise.
Threat activity tracking CVE-2026-38972
No threat campaign in the Threadlinqs corpus currently references CVE-2026-38972, in its CVE list or as an indicator. The linkage is recomputed from the live corpus on every daily ingest, so this section fills in as soon as a tracked campaign cites the identifier.
Sources
Enriched from CVE.org, NVD. Last verified by Threadlinqs on . This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.