February's Patch Tuesday sees Microsoft offer just 63 fixes Microsoft’s February patch collection is mercifully smaller than January’s mega-dump. But don't get too relaxed – some deserve close attention, and other vendors have stepped in with plenty more fixes. Of the 63 patches (including six released earlier in the month) Microsoft announced, two are already being exploited. Both …
Although I haven't been able to find any information -- none at all --, it is likely that the 'file' is a shortcut, (.lnk), pointing to some offsite location, and that Windows is attempting to authenticate against that offsite location. Potentially there are other ways of doing the same thing (shell scraps, etc)., some of which might be non-obvious.
If anybody finds more discussion, I'm curious.
Apparently, according to several sources, KB5051974 also forces the new Outlook app on users. So, after the customary reboot, I went searching for Outlook in order to delete it but found it conspicuously absent!
Maybe it saw that I was using Thunderbird/Betterbird and decided I was already a "lost cause" and didn't bother to install it.
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