All news with #windows lnk tag

Windows LNK Shortcut Abuse Addressed by Recent Patches

🔒 Microsoft has quietly altered how Windows displays .lnk shortcut Targets, addressing a long‑abused technique attackers used to hide malicious commands in trailing whitespace. The issue (tracked as CVE-2025-9491) stemmed from Explorer showing only the first 260 characters of a Target field, allowing long PowerShell or BAT scripts to be concealed. Third‑party vendor 0patch acknowledges the UI change but says Microsoft’s fix doesn't prevent execution and offers a micropatch that truncates long Targets and warns users.

Chinese Hackers Exploit Hard-to-Patch Windows Shortcut Flaw

🛡️Arctic Wolf reports that Chinese government-linked actors, tracked as UNC6384 and linked to the longer-running Mustang Panda cluster, conducted spear-phishing campaigns in September and October targeting diplomats in Hungary, Belgium, Serbia, Italy and the Netherlands by abusing a long-known Windows .LNK shortcut parsing flaw. The vulnerability allows command-line instructions to be concealed in .LNK whitespace so attackers can display decoy PDFs—such as an agenda for a European Commission meeting—while executing payloads that deploy the PlugX remote-access Trojan. Trend Micro and ZDI previously documented the issue (i.e., ZDI-CAN-25373, later CVE-2025-9491), but Microsoft has so far declined to fully patch it; Arctic Wolf advises blocking or disabling .LNK execution, monitoring for related binaries like cnmpaui.exe, and blocking C2 domains as interim mitigations.