Microsoft quietly patches LNK vulnerability that's been weaponized for years

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Microsoft’s November 2025 Patch Tuesday fixed 63 flaws, including CVE-2025-9491 in Windows LNK files
The bug let attackers hide malicious commands in shortcut files, enabling RCE attacks
Exploited since 2017 by state-sponsored groups from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia; severity rated 7.8/10

The November 2025 Patch Tuesday cumulative update fixed a vulnerability that hackers have been exploiting for years.

On November 12, Microsoft released a patch that addressed 63 vulnerabilities. Among them was a “Microsoft Windows LNK file UI misrepresentation” vulnerability that enabled Remote Code Execution (RCE) attacks via weaponized shortcut (.LNK) files.

According to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), “crafted data in an .LNK file can cause hazardous content in the file to be invisible to a user who inspects the file via the Windows-provided user interface. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the current user.”

Abused for years

In other words, the bug lets attackers hide what the shortcut really does. When a victim right-clicks the shortcut file to check its properties, Windows hides the file’s full path and commands it will run, making the file appear safe even when it isn’t.

The bug is now tracked as CVE-2025-9491 and has a severity score of 7.8/10 (high).

Cybercriminals turned to .LNK files years ago, when Microsoft first banned the use of macros in downloaded Office files. In more recent times, Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) reported that the bug was being weaponized by 11 state-sponsored groups from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, who were using it for cyber-espionage, data theft, and fraud, apparently since 2017.

At first, Microsoft did not want to fix it, telling The Hacker News it wasn’t that big of a deal. It also said that the .LNK format is blocked in Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote and whoever tried running these files would get a warning not to open documents from unknown sources.

However, since multiple cybersecurity companies warned about the abuse, and pointed out that state-sponsored attackers were using the bug too, Microsoft decided to fix it.

Via The Hacker News

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Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.

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