Dangerous security vulnerabilities can occur in virtually any Windows app. Now it’s Microsoft Paint’s turn. The well-known Windows drawing app contains a vulnerability that attackers can exploit to inject malicious code. The user doesn’t even need to click on anything for it to happen.
Microsoft rated the threat posed by the CVE-2026-83844 vulnerability at 8.1 out of 10 and released a fix on October 13th, which was the last major Patch Tuesday. The problem? That patch apparently never reached some users, meaning the Paint app remains unpatched and vulnerable.
This was reported by Windows Latest, who checked the version of the Paint app on their system. It corresponded to the version number prior to the security patch (in this case 11.2603.251.0) and not the recommended patched version (which should be 11.2609.401.0).
Some antivirus software apparently flagged Paint as unpatched, and some users and administrators noticed that their version of Paint had apparently not been updated. It’s still unclear whether the fault lies in the distribution of the update or in Paint itself. Both Windows Latest and other affected users had automatic updates correctly enabled in their settings.
To check which version of Paint is installed on your system, you can enter the following command in Windows PowerShell, which you can launch by right-clicking on the Start menu and selecting Terminal (Admin). Then in the PowerShell window, enter the following command:
Get-AppxPackage -Name Microsoft.Paint | Select-Object Name, Version Then compare the version number with the version recommended by Microsoft (11.2609.401.0). Alternatively, you can search for Paint under Installed apps in Windows Settings and check the version number there (you may need to click on “Advanced options” first).
It’s entirely possible that Microsoft has simply gotten the version number wrong. But to be on the safe side, you should download and install the latest version of Paint from the Microsoft Store.
