Suspicious links could lead to the theft of information or even cause severe damage to your device. Imagine you have got a new email and everything is just not adding up. The domain of the email looks suspicious and even the language its self looks suspicious. How do you open such a link to make sure you do not end up installing a virus on your machine or probably surveillance software you don’t know about?

Do not click on the suspicious link. Just hover your mouse over it.

By hovering a mouse over the link, you are able to notice the actual link. Hackers love disguising links through URL shorteners to make them look different. Gmail has a feature that makes you view the actual link. This is actually safe

Unshorten the link if it is shortened.

Unshortening is part of the procedure of how to safely open a suspicious link. If the suspicious link you have hovered on is shortened, it is best you unshorten the link using a tool like unshorten me. Through this, you will be able to view and copy the actual link for analysis

https://unshorten.me

Copy the suspicious link that is unshortened and paste it in a word document or any document created and save it.

It is better you paste the link in a separate document without clicking on it. This will allow you to easily transfer it to a more safer computer for verification. If you feel that your machine is safe enough, then you should copy the link, paste it in a separate tab and verify it. While verifying the link, i strongly advice you to use a separate email account for login into google or better still check the link out without an account being logged in. Consider the requirements below to render your personal machine safe for opening links

• Have a VPN on. A VPN hides your IP address to prevent the attacker from investigating you
• Use an anonymity browser like tor or turn on incognito mode on chrome to prevent your personal details from being leaked
• Use a safe environment like a virtual machine. Virtual machines isolate the environment from the physical operating system. An example is Kali Linux Virtual Machine
• Have an antivirus installed

Put it in USB drive and transfer it to an analytics machine to view the content

Copy and paste the document in a USB drive and then plug in to a dedicated computer(A computer that doesn’t have your personal information or one dedicated for malware investigation). Copy and paste the link from the drive to the computer and open it from there. Use the browser of the dedicated computer to view the link. Even the dedicated machine should have safe features as mentioned in the above point. If you need to carry out more analysis on the link, i would advise you use a tool like VirusTotal to analyze the level of malware in the link. You do not need a high level of coding skills to use this tool. You only need to know how to read and write

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/url

Why should we investigate links?

It is through links that malware is spread. A dangerous link has the power to run an automatic installation on your computer, install a virus that will potentially harm your computer or even let you install malware in the computer

Learn more about phishing links

Types of phishing attacks

Effective ways of fighting phishing

Phishing attack examples