The abuse of shortcut (LNK) files is steadily gaining traction among cybercriminals. We’ve seen a plethora of threats that leverage malicious LNK files: from well-known ransomware families, backdoors typically deployed in targeted attacks, and banking Trojans to spam emails, even an exploit to a LNK vulnerability itself. These threats are usually exacerbated by the further abuse of legitimate tools such as PowerShell, or script automation utility AutoIt. It’s thus not surprising that we discovered an information stealer employing LNK files, which our sensors detected in Israeli hospitals.
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