CrowdStrike researchers have documented a multi-stage attack chain that weaponizes Microsoft’s ClickOnce deployment framework, a widely trusted enterprise technology, to deliver and persist malicious payloads without requiring elevated privileges or triggering standard email security filters. Because ClickOnce runs silently through trusted Windows binaries and its auto-update mechanism can pull attacker-controlled code without user interaction, this technique lowers the cost of entry for a broad range of threat actors. The research signals a maturing pattern of living-off-the-land abuse targeting legitimate deployment infrastructure, demanding immediate defensive attention from any organization that allows ClickOnce in its environment.