Anyone who’s followed me for a bit knows that I’m a huge proponent of metadata, and in particular, exploiting metadata in LNK files that threat actors create, use as lures, and send to their targets.
I read an article not long ago from Splunk titled, LNK or Swim: Analysis & Simulation of Recent LNK Phishing. The article covered a good bit of information regarding LNK files sent by some threat actors, and even included a list of metadata items that could be used for “threat intel purposes”, as illustrated in figure 1.
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| Fig. 1: Splunk article excerpt |
However, what’s illustrated in figure 1 was as far as they went. In fact, reading through the article and looking at the images of LNK parser tool output, each of those images is cut off before embedded metadata and “extra data blocks” can be seen. Even then, including this information in the images would require analysts to manually transpose this information, which is a very inefficient and error-prone process, particularly given how small some of these images are within the article.
I will say that the article does go on to talk about the use of LNK files in phishing campaigns, and provides a link to an LNK generator tool. There are some definite opportunities here for a research project, where LNK metadata is compared across different creation methods (righ-click on
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