>I'm still on 8.5.8 (Oct 2023) - it turns out I'm actually...safer?

Notepad++ site says The incident began from June 2025.

On their downloads page, 8.8.2 was the first update in June 2025 (the previous update 8.8.1 was released 2025-05-05)

So, if your installed version is 8.8.1 or lower, then you should be safe. Assuming that they're right about when the incident began.

edit: Notepad++ has published, on Github, SHA256 hashes of all the binaries for all download versions, which should let users check if they were targeted, if they still have the downloaded file. 8.8.1 is here, for example - https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/relea...