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Safely Check Out Any Website in Seconds
You know how you get those web links and you know you shouldn’t, but you REALLY want to see what is on that page? I’ve got a quick and dirty way to help ease your curiosity and do it without putting you, your machine or your company at risk.
For quite some time, I have been using the website Browserling to check out sites that I am interested in that may be suspicious or malicious. Usually, it’s because I am curious what a basic user might see, and I don’t want to go through the hassle of mirroring the site and doing analysis. Instead, I can take a quick look at the site itself, with almost no work or risk.
I have no affiliation with the site, but I use it often. It was originally designed for webmasters to test their sites with various browsers and versions. I find it useful to quickly assess phishing links, check out various sites on the fly or get a quick overview of a page or two. The multiple versions of browsers available have been useful in the past against different phishing kits to figure out what User Agent they are targeting, if they have access lists defined using those criteria.
The site is not fast, limits sessions to only a few minutes per page and is not useful for general browsing day to day. However, it is a quick and dirty, and often quite useful tool when I am moving fast to assess a site and determine if it is hostile or not.
Of course, as always, your paranoia and mileage may vary. But, for me, in this specific use case, this is a useful tool in my toolkit.
