Actively exploited Windows LNK issue silently addressed by Microsoft

SecurityWeek reports that mitigations for a high-severity Windows LNK flaw subjected to years-long exploitation have been silently provided by Microsoft as part of last month's security updates.

Microsoft addressed the CVE-2025-9491 vulnerability which stems from Windows' failure to show nefarious activity upon inspection of the shortcut file's properties tab and has been leveraged to facilitate malware deployment by displaying the entire string in the properties tab's 'Target' field, according to Acros Security, which also issued another fix for 0Patch solution users. Such a patch from Microsoft comes after the firm initially regarded the issue as not requiring immediate servicing.

"Windows identifies shortcut files (.lnk) as a potentially dangerous file type. Attempting to open a .lnk file downloaded from the Internet automatically triggers a security warning advising users not to open files from unknown sources, and we strongly recommend heeding this warning," said Microsoft in an earlier guidance.