Your Linux Can Get Hacked Just by Opening a File in Vim or Neovim Editor
Jun 10, 2019
Linux users, beware! If you haven't recently updated your Linux operating system, especially the command-line text editor utility, do not even try to view the content of a file using Vim or Neovim. Security researcher Armin Razmjou recently discovered a high-severity arbitrary OS command execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-12735) in Vim and Neovim —two most popular and powerful command-line text editing applications that come pre-installed with most Linux-based operating systems. On Linux systems, Vim editor allows users to create, view or edit any file, including text, programming scripts, and documents. Since Neovim is just an extended forked version of Vim, with better user experience, plugins and GUIs, the code execution vulnerability also resides in it. Code Execution Flaw in Vim and Neovim Razmjou discovered a flaw in the way Vim editor handles "modelines," a feature that's enabled-by-default to automatically find and apply a set of custom pref...
