📡 Wietze Beukema

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Trust Me, I’m a Shortcut

Deep technical dive into the Windows LNK (shortcut) binary file format by researcher Wietze Beukema, explaining how attackers abuse ambiguities between what Windows Explorer's Properties dialog displays and what actually executes. Covers the in-the-wild CVE-2025-9491 command-line padding trick plus four newly documented variants exploiting EnvironmentVariableDataBlock, LinkTargetIDList and LinkInfo fields to spoof targets and hide command-line arguments, and releases the open-source lnk-it-up toolkit (lnk-generator and lnk-tester) for building and detecting these malicious LNKs.

Offensive Security, Blue Team & Detection· 2026-02-12T00:00:00+00:00