What's the safest way to open a suspicious link?

Question

Sometimes I get very suspicious messages or I see a random link somewhere I obviously don't click on them but I'm still curious what's on the site. So that makes me wonder what's the safest way to view the website whilst making sure that even if it contains a virus my computer won't get infected? I personally don't trust antivirus software that much if there is a high chance of the website being infected.

Maybe disabling javascript before clicking on the link? Would that do the trick? But that would most likely mess with the webpage itself.

Basically my question is: How can I safely open a link that I know is malicious?

score 11 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 29 '22 at 08:16

If you don't want to interact with the suspicious webpage and instead just quickly want to see what it is, the easiest and safest way to open the link is probably by using an online screen capturing service for websites (e.g., https://www.screenshotmachine.com or https://screenshot.guru).

This not only requires zero setup on your part, it's also as close to 100% safe as you can get in this context. Note however, that this only applies to viewing the screenshot of the webpage -- a very sophisticated attacker could serve different content to the screenshotting service than to you, if you were to click on the link on your own device after viewing the screenshot of the website.

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 29 '22 at 11:31

Running a browser in a VM is a good added layer of security. However, there have been security holes in VMs that let code escape to the host. (Although those are relatively rare and probably difficult to exploit quickly from a malicious link.)

If the link is beyond suspicious, into paranoid, you could boot a (linux) live disk from cdrom or other read only media on a system with no hard disk and visit the link.

timguy · Answer 3 · 2023-04-06T08:31:20.053

Not really open the page but just to see what's in it or see if it is forwarding your request:

Open your terminal (e.g. in windows: "WINDOWS+R", type cmd)
Use curl command in terminal:

curl -v gooogle.com

Host: gooogle.com
User-Agent: curl/7.83.1
Accept: */*
<HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;  charset=utf-8">
    <TITLE>301 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
    <H1>301 Moved</H1>
    The document has moved
    <A HREF="https://www.google.com/">here</A>.
    </BODY></HTML>

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 29 '22 at 09:28

Adding safety mechanisms is good and should not be limited to suspicious links. The most successful attacks used links which didn't look suspicious at all.

I count NoScript as one of the best protections, thus blocking the execution of JavaScript for all websites that I don't know. JavaScript is the most dangerous attack vector through your browser.

Apart from this, there is only one way to totally isolate your computer, and that's using a virtual machine for following the suspicious link.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 17 '23 at 01:37

Just use an old crappy phone from thrift shop, never your own unless you run a massive over-writing program that fills it with complete junk. Remember even a factory reset can be recovered. Layer over layer over layer. I do this kind of over-writing before I sell/donate any device

What's the safest way to open a suspicious link?

5 Answers5