In an effort to stop potentially dangerous code from running, Microsoft claims that Windows PowerShell now issues warnings when executing scripts that utilize the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet to get web content.
According to Microsoft, this mitigates a high-severity PowerShell remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2025-54100), which mainly affects enterprise or IT-managed environments that use PowerShell scripts for automation. This is because PowerShell scripts are not as frequently used outside of these environments.
The warning has been introduced to Windows PowerShell 5.1, which is the version of PowerShell that comes pre-installed on Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs. It is intended to add the same safe web parsing procedure as is present in PowerShell 7.
If you download web pages using the “Invoke-WebRequest” cmdlet, PowerShell will notify you that scripts on those pages could run on your system read more about Windows PowerShell now warns when running Invoke-WebRequest scripts.
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