Internet Explorer may be dead, but its ghost still runs malware

Microsoft’s aging “mshta.exe” utility, a leftover component from Internet Explorer, is still being actively abused in modern malware campaigns years after the browser itself was retired. According to new research from Bitdefender, attackers continue to abuse Microsoft HTML Application Host (MSHTA), a built-in Windows utility capable of executing VBScript and JavaScript from local or remote files. Despite Internet Explorer reaching the end of life in 2022, MSHTA is packaged by default on Windows