OneNote is a software part of the Office suite, commonly used within most organisations for note-keeping, task management and more. In the last year, OneNote gained more attention from a security perspective, mostly thanks to the research paper published by Emeric Nasi.

While tracking some prevalent commodity malware threat actors, Talos observed the popularization of malicious LNK files as their initial access method to download and execute payloads. A closer look at the LNK files illustrates how their metadata could be used to identify and track new campaigns.

Microsoft's move last year to block macros by default in Office applications is forcing miscreants to find other tools with which to launch cyberattacks, including the software vendor's LNK files – the shortcuts Windows uses to point to other files.