Shortcut Scanner removes broken links that can exploit Microsoft Windows shortcuts. Video tutorial available.

One of these exploits was already known and being used in phishing scams, and another was discovered by the security researchers at Phrozen Software. Since it has not been addressed by Microsoft, they created this tool.

Shortcut Scanner will scan available attached storage media that you select and list all existing shortcuts and let you know if it is Broken, Suspicious or Dangerous. That is explained more in the video below.



Broken means the target application or target folder points to a non-existing location. A broken shortcut is not something considered harmful but worth to be removed since the shortcut itself become useless.

Suspicious means what it says. It could be valid, but check if the link goes to a valid shortcut. You want to use caution here not to delete a good shortcut.

Dangerous means that multiple flags were triggered and most likely they need to be deleted. Here are some tips on determining what is a dangerous shortcut.

If the target application points to a command prompt (Terminal, PowerShell, Ubuntu Bash)

If it contains dangerous keywords often used to create malicious shortcuts

An argument overflow, which means that the shortcut command line is more than the Microsoft Windows limitation of 260 characters (MAX PATH)

Shortcut file size is above 4KiB

Contains arguments plus one of above flags