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OpenAdvisories
High · 8.8 CVE-2026-54525 EUVD-2026-101581

Markdown Preview Enhanced: One Click RCE via Markdown Link Command Injection on Windows

Published Oct 14, 2026 · Updated Oct 15, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

Markdown Preview Enhanced is a Markdown preview extension for Visual Studio Code. Prior to 0.8.28, Markdown Preview Enhanced preview-link handling passes a decoded, Markdown-controlled link target to a Windows file-opening helper that invokes child_process.exec with the start command. When a Windows user opens an untrusted Markdown file and clicks a crafted external or unsupported-scheme link, shell metacharacters in the decoded target are interpreted by cmd.exe as command separators, allowing an attacker-selected command to run with the privileges of the current VS Code user. The attack requires one normal preview-link click but does not require malicious workspace configuration, script execution to be enabled, or additional files. This issue is fixed in version 0.8.28.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
shd101wyy vscode-markdown-preview-enhanced < 0.8.28 —

References