What's the safest way to open a suspicious link?
Andrew Henderson 
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?
42 Answers
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.
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.
