Is there any harm to be expected, if I just clicked on such a link described in this question?
Asked
Active
Viewed 337 times
2 Answers
0
A short and obvious answer to your question's header "Can a simple webpage link contain any virus or do harm to my system?" is YES! Yes, your system can be easily compromised by exploiting lots of vulnerabilities in various components of the web browser, e.g. plugins.
In addition to this - your details can be collected by the attacker to conduct a recon/scan on the collected IP.
Rishi
- 1
0
Absolutely yes. When you click a link, your browser does more than just download data from a web site. Images/sounds/videos get uncompressed and displayed, JavaScript/Flash gets executed, browser state data gets modified implicitly or explicitly, and much more. A flaw or oversight in anything that processes, interprets, displays or stores any of the data on the page, can cause problems which might be exploitable. All of this takes on a whole new level of worrying when you consider that so much of what you download in the course of loading a web page is either user created, or comes from third parties.
Dan
- 198
- 5