Updates with new clarifications from this comment:
Target InformationKaspersky only saw evidence of victims IP addresses in Vietnam, El Salvador, Australia and the Philippines, and noted, “We observed three different infection chains overall, designed to attack about a dozen machines…”.
Thus, it wasn’t just “targeted” – out of all the update attempts that would have happened during the June to December timeframe, it appears there were only a dozen victims: everyone else got a normal, unaffected update, with no malicious payload.
Obvious Side-effect: Notepad++ Not Actually Updated after “Update”When the attackers redirected victims, the victims got “updaters” which did nothing to notepad++.exe. If every time that automatic updates ran, you saw Notepad++ actually updated, you were not one of the victims.
In case the user runs Notepad++ updater, if the version remains exactly the same after the attempted update, the user can check %LOCALAPPDATA%\Notepad++\log\securityError.log to see what happened & report it.