LOLBins are one of the slickest and most effective tools attackers use today—they’re native, trusted binaries already built into Windows systems, like PowerShell, certutil, mshta, and rundll32, and threat actors weaponize them to fly under the radar and stay FUD. Since these tools are signed by Microsoft and commonly used in IT environments, they don’t trigger alarms in traditional antivirus engines or even many EDR solutions unless you’re running tight behavioral analytics.

Attackers use them to download payloads, escalate privileges, execute malicious scripts, and maintain persistence—all without ever dropping a single suspicious file on disk.

Blue teams are starting to catch on, hardening environments with AppLocker, Software Restriction Policies, and Defender Attack Surface Reduction rules, but a ton of orgs still leave these doors wide open. At Cyber Protection Academy, we teach students how to both detect and leverage LOLBins—because if you don’t understand how these native tools can be used against you, you’re fighting blind.