■■■■□ Statement issued by Notepad++
Dear Customer,
We want to further update you following the previous communication with us about your server compromise and further investigation with your incident response team.
We discovered the suspicious events in our logs, which indicate that the server (where your application https://notepad-plus-plus.org/update/getDownloadUrl.php was hosted until the 1st of December, 2025) could have been compromised.
As a precautionary measure, we immediately transferred all clients’ web hosting subscriptions from this server to a new server and continued our further investigation.
Here are the key finding points:
1. The shared hosting server in question was compromised until the 2nd of September, 2025. On this particular date, the server had scheduled maintenance where the kernel and firmware were updated. After this date, we could not identify any similar patterns in logs, and this indicates that bad actors have lost access to the server. We also find no evidence of similar patterns on any other shared hosting servers.
2. Even though the bad actors have lost access to the server from the 2nd of September, 2025, they maintained the credentials of our internal services existing on that server until the 2nd of December, 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 and return the updates download URL with compromised updates.
3. Based on our logs, we see no other clients hosted on this particular server being targeted. The bad actors specifically searched for https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ domain with the goal to intercept the traffic to your website, as they might know the then-existing Notepad++ vulnerabilities related to insufficient update verification controls.
4. After concluding our research, the investigated security findings were no longer observed in the web hosting systems from the 2nd of December, 2025, and onwards, as:
* We have fixed vulnerabilities, which could have been used to target Notepad++. In particular, we do have logs indicating that the bad actor tried to re-exploit one of the fixed vulnerabilities; however, the attempt did not succeed after the fix was implemented.
* We have rotated all the credentials that bad actors could have obtained until the 2nd of September, 2025.
* We have checked the logs for similar patterns in all web hosting servers and couldn’t find any evidence of systems being compromised, exploited in a similar way, or data breached.
While we have rotated all the secrets on our end, below you will find the preventive actions you should take to maximize your security. However, if below actions have been done after the 2nd of December, 2025, no actions are needed from your side.
* Change credentials for SSH, FTP/SFTP, and MySQL database.
* Review administrator accounts for your WordPress sites (if you have any), change their passwords, and remove unnecessary users.
* Update your WordPress sites (if you have any) plugins, themes, and core version, and turn on automatic updates, if applicable.
We appreciate your cooperation and understanding. Please let us know in case you have any.