3 Ways To Protect Yourself Against Malicious Links

When it comes to suspicious links, the most common advice is to not click them. This is great advice! But- what if you really want to click? Additionally, maybe the link was pretty darn convincing and your pointer finger clicked without you even having a chance to think. While abstinence is clearly the most surefire way to mitigate your risk online, it is not feasible to expect perfect abstinence throughout your entire web browsing, YouTube cat video-watching, and torrent-downloading, career. My goal is that by the end of this article, you will be able to click without fear (or at least click with reduced fear) and to help you mitigate your chances of being impacted by malicious links.

Keep in mind, these suggestions are not mutually exclusive and can be used in conjunction for extra protection.

If you clicked this link, then congratulations you’ve been tricked! I apologize for my devious ploy and for sending you to Bing, but sometimes it is best to learn things the hard way.

The question is: How do I see where a link is sending me before I click on it?

Here are a couple of ways:

So let’s do a quick exercise!

Using a VM is a must when it comes to risky link-clicking. If you do not know what a VM is, it is basically a computer within a computer (computerception).

Imagine your computer as the “main” computer, a virtual machine is basically like a toy computer that utilizes some of the resources of the main computer. While this toy computer shares hardware with the main computer, its storage and memory are separated from the main computer to keep you protected. This toy machine will act as a sandbox environment where you can destroy it, and click risky links, and it will not impact your actual computer. You can just picture it similar to a cheap burner laptop.

This will help protect you against even an accidental click of a malicious link because the threat will be confined to the virtual machine itself and not infect your main computer. Obviously, if you have any personal information, files, account info, or credentials saved on the virtual machine, then the malware could still impact that. So if you are using a virtual machine for risky link-clicking, it is best to make sure to not sign into any personal accounts using that VM.

Note: Virtual machines are not perfect. Malware can escape your virtual machine. While it is possible for malware to escape the virtual machine and infect your main machine, it is very unlikely. Virtual machine escape bugs are incredibly valuable and it is unlikely that a hacker would waste such a bug on a random person’s computer and risk their valuable bug being patched out of existence.

If you want a video/article on how to configure a virtual machine, let me know in the comments!

Below is an image of what a suspicious program/link would look like in VirusTotal. I found this malware in my honeypot (a trap I set up for hackers). Find out more about my honeypot findings in this article.

Hopefully, after reading this article you can now surf the web with reduced fear! While none of these methods are perfect, they will drastically reduce your risk of falling victim to suspicious links.

If you liked this article please comment, like, and subscribe! I have a lot of fun writing these and would love to hear what else you all would like me to write about!

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