Windows 11: your screenshots threaten to reveal your secrets to the world

• Windows 11 Snipping Tool Hit by Same Security Vulnerability as Recently Discovered Severe Flaw in Google Pixels
• In some cases, even if you remove personal information from your captures – such as your email address, phone number or payment details – the capture file may still keep traces of this data that can be easily extracted later.
• Microsoft claims to investigate and recommends following a few steps to avoid the risk of inadvertently transmitting sensitive data via your screenshots

Windows 11 includes, as you know, a native screen capture tool – which is very handy. However, security researchers recently discovered a security vulnerability in this system application. This looks like another flaw discovered in Google’s Pixel smartphone screenshot tools.

Very concretely, when you often share screenshots, you know that it is important to delete certain sensitive information. Which is very easy to do via the system captures tool. The problem is that in some cases, even if you delete your phone, email, credit card numbers or any other sensitive data, the data may remain stored in the original file… without your knowledge.

Windows 11 Snipping Tool: Thought You Hid Your Credit Card Code? Fatal error…

It is then trivial to extract them, which can have devastating consequences, especially in the case of sharing that is a little too public – or in the case of scams. It is quite simple to cause the bug at home: take a screenshot using the native tool, and immediately press the button Register, without leaving the tool. From there, crop and edit the screenshot and save it again in the same file.

The deleted data should then still be available in the file. Now imagine you are taking a screenshot of a banking transaction and need to delete sensitive personal information. If you use the Windows 11 Snipping Tool to make this change, and save the file twice, the vulnerability threatens to allow an attacker to access this sensitive information.

Another potentially dangerous case: in the case of a telephone scam, an operator can ask to capture a bank page, before giving instructions to hide sensitive data via the tool and asking their victim to send them the capture file. Scammers can then easily remove caches, or undelete portions of the image, allowing them to empty their victim’s account without their knowledge.

holy FUCK.

Windows Snipping Tool is vulnerable to Acropalypse too.

An entirely unrelated codebase.

The same exploit script works with minor changes (the pixel format is RGBA not RGB)

Tested myself on Windows 11 https://t.co/5q2vb6jWOn pic.twitter.com/ovJKPr0x5Y

—David Buchanan (@David3141593) March 21, 2023

However it is pointed out, the vulnerability seems to have a limited scope and is specific to the way screenshots are taken by the user.

How to Avoid Windows 11 Screenshot Vulnerability

Until a fix is ​​released, Microsoft advises these simple steps to ensure your screenshots don’t leak your secrets to the world:

1. Take your screenshot using Windows 11 Snipping Tool
2. Press the “save” button
3. Save your screenshot
4. Choose a new file name
5. Validate

The moment you save your capture to a new file all traces of previous edits or the original image containing sensitive data will be removed.