Newsletter
How frequently do you use the Microsoft Windows Snipping tool to take a screenshot? Possibly, while browsing and you come across a page that’d be useful later, you might just take a quick screenshot. But this tool seems to have some issues affecting the screenshots that you save.
This issue alters the way you edit screenshots before saving them to your computer’s storage. Researchers have discovered a bug that seems to be plaguing the Microsoft Windows Snipping tool. Should users of Windows-powered devices worry about this recently discovered bug?
Well, you should worry about it if you are sharing the screenshots you take on your Windows device. This is because some details that you might not want to share with others via the screenshot can be accessed. Here is everything you need to know about this screenshot problem plaguing Windows-powered devices.
The Microsoft Windows Snipping tool reveals cropped-out details in screenshots
Researchers have uncovered an exploit impacting the Microsoft Windows Snipping tool. It affects both Windows 10 and 11 powered devices. This exploit saves details that users crop out while taking a screenshot.
Being confident that some confidential or unimportant information has been cropped-out, users might proceed to share their screenshots with the public. Unknowing to them, the details cropped out are still accessible to the public. Recovering the original screenshot is done with a tool known as Acropalypse, made popular by a similar vulnerability.
David Buchanan took to his Twitter page to let the public know about this flaw. He went on to test out the flaw by taking a screenshot on his Windows 11 device and it was also impacted. With the Acropalypse tool, he was able to view cropped-out parts of his screenshot.
David also noted that this flaw was also present in Windows 10’s Snip & Sketch tool. This vulnerability first hit on Pixel devices, where it saved cropped-out details on screenshots. Just like with Windows, Acropalypse could be used to recover all cropped-out details.
Well, a fix to this issue was made a few days ago, but it is not yet available globally. Windows seems to be taking its time to fix this issue before rolling it out to the public. Until you get the fix, it is important to be careful when it comes to sharing screenshots that previously contained sensitive information on the internet.