March 5, 2026
Jeff Ulatoski
Director of Product Management, Omnissa
Jeff Ulatoski leads the product team at Omnissa driving the Apps Everywhere vision and strategy. He directs the development of the App Volumes, Dynamic Environment Manager, and ThinApp products, with a focus on delivering Apps on Demand to meet the evolving needs of modern enterprises. With over 25 years of experience in IT and software development, Jeff has extensive expertise in large-scale enterprise software deployments, business process analysis, and end-user computing systems. His leadership ensures that Omnissa’s solutions are innovative, scalable, and aligned with the future of app virtualization and management.
Most IT teams treat “keep apps up to date” as basic hygiene. The Notepad++ updater incident is a reminder that the updater itself can become the delivery vehicle for vulnerabilities—especially when endpoints pull updates directly from the internet outside your control plane.
This isn’t just about one tool. It’s about Windows—and the machinery we’ve built around it over the years: packaging, testing, approvals, change windows, help desks, and incident response. When that machinery is slow, “control” turns into “damage control.”
The takeaway isn’t, “patch faster.” It’s, own the distribution path—and make rollback easy.
Public reporting and vendor research describe a targeted campaign where some victims were selectively redirected from legitimate Notepad++ update traffic to attacker-controlled infrastructure and served tampered update content.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tracks the core issue as CVE-2025-15556: Notepad++ versions prior to 8.8.9, when using the WinGUp updater, did not adequately validate signatures in a way that could allow an attacker who can intercept/redirect update traffic to deliver an attacker-controlled installer.
This pattern shows up everywhere:
Do we allow apps to self-update from the internet, or do we treat apps like governed enterprise artifacts?
If you want fewer “surprise updates,” you need two properties:
That’s the model modern IT wants—but many Windows estates struggle to achieve it because the surrounding process is slow: testing cycles, approvals, and the sheer number of hands in the chain.
Here’s a practical way to think about governed rollout with App Volumes.
1) Updates don’t come from the app’s updater
Apps are delivered as managed packages. Updates happen when IT publishes a new package—not when an endpoint reaches out to the internet at runtime.
Two implications:
2) Package stages make lifecycle intent explicit
Instead of treating releases as one big event, stages represent intent and state:
3) A “Current” marker communicates what’s live
Stages tell you where a package is in its lifecycle. A marker tells you what users should get.
A “Current” marker becomes a simple abstraction:
This matters in incidents because the fastest safe response is rarely “repackage everything.” It’s flip the estate back to known-good for a specific app while you investigate.
Even with governed packaging, you still want a safety net at execution time—especially for higher-risk populations (admins, privileged workstations, dev desktops).
Dynamic Environment Manager (DEM) can add practical guardrails, for example:
Guardrails won’t fix a bad update by themselves—but they can reduce the success rate of update-path abuse. For higher assurance, you’d pair this with OS-level application control like WDAC or AppLocker.
One takeaway: Your real control isn’t “patch faster.” It’s own the distribution path—and have rollback.
This is the scenario for Apps Essentials (App Volumes + DEM + ThinApp): apps as governed artifacts (not internet updaters), stage changes safely, and keep rollback fast—especially across Windows estates with a lot of legacy process around updates.
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