Shortcuts (LNK files) in Windows are indicated by curved arrows. We often treat them as background noise and don't consider what they actually do beyond opening apps. In fact, there is a huge gap ...

Russian CTRL toolkit spread via malicious LNK files in February 2026, routing C2 through FRP-tunneled RDP to evade detection.

A series of malicious LNK files targeting users in South Korea has been detected using a multi-stage attack chain that uses ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

GitHub has been drawn into another cyber threat case after researchers uncovered a multi-stage malware campaign using ...

The Emotet botnet is now using Windows shortcut files (.LNK) containing PowerShell commands to infect victims computers, moving away from Microsoft Office macros that are now disabled by default. The ...

Hackers who normally distributed malware via phishing attachments with malicious macros gradually changed tactics after Microsoft Office began blocking them by default, switching to new file types ...

When Microsoft patched a vulnerability last summer that allowed threat actors to use Windows’ shortcut (.lnk) files in exploits, defenders might have hoped use of this tactic would decline. They were ...