HOW MALWARE AUTHORS PLAY WITH THE LNK FILE FORMAT

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Malware authors are utilizing LNK files as a malware delivery mechanism now that Microsoft is deprecating Macros. This blog post goes into detail on various techniques that are used by the malware authors like running minimized, executing other binaries as well as icon smuggling. The post contains links for defenders to use for analyzing LNK files.