The number of ways that Windows shortcut (.LNK) files can be abused just keeps growing: A cybersecurity researcher has documented four new techniques to trick Windows users into running malicious ...

Malware researchers have noticed a new tool that helps cybercriminals build malicious .LNK files to deliver payloads for the initial stages of an attack. LNKs are Windows shortcut files that can ...

Eeek! All versions of Microsoft Windows have a nasty shortcut-file vulnerability, it has emerged. Simply displaying the icon of a crafty .LNK file will cause malware infection. The Stuxnet worm has ...

A third-party patch management company is cutting short attackers’ use of LNK files to smuggle in malicious commands, while Microsoft prefers to tell the whole story. A longstanding problem with the ...

North Korea's APT37 threat group is providing fresh evidence of how adversaries have pivoted to using LNK, or shortcut files, to distribute malicious payloads after Microsoft began blocking macros by ...

Forensic investigators use LNK shortcut files to recover metadata about recently accessed files, including files deleted after the time of access. In a recent investigation, FireEye Mandiant ...

Chinese hackers have been spotted targeting European diplomats using a longstanding Windows shortcut vulnerability that’s been popular with threat groups as far back as 2017. According to security ...

Microsoft has fixed a Windows Smart App Control and SmartScreen flaw that has been exploited in attacks as a zero-day since at least 2018. On vulnerable systems, threat actors have abused the ...

A newly discovered cyber vulnerability, ZDI-CAN-25373, has been actively exploited by 11 state-sponsored threat groups from North Korea, Iran, Russia and China since 2017. According to the Trend Zero ...

I'm the sole Mac user in a Windows-based company, and all of our files are stored in a collection of Windows Server shares in a whole bunch of relatively organized directories. We frequently include ...

It's not particularly surprising, as that bit of code doesn't actually seem to contain the malware. It's shady as all fuck, but it depends on the existence of the .lnk file to actually do anything. If ...

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-9491, allowed cybercriminals to hide malicious commands from users inspecting files through Windows’ standard interface. Microsoft quietly patched a critical Windows ...