Can I get any virus from google images in my system?
Can using "Save image as" on google images be dangerous?
I was wondering if some malicious code could be placed in the image file (the formats I am concerned with are JPEG, PNG and WEBP, basically the common formats available when you download from google), for example as metadata, so that it would be executed when opened (or simply downloaded but that seems less likely), and if such malicious images can be obtained from Google Images after right clicking on it after a search and selecting "save image as".
In general, viewing an image is safe.
- Viewing Google cached versions of an image is the safest.
- Viewing the original image on the original site is usually very safe as well.
- Visiting the page of an unknown site is always a small risk, but Google is pretty good about blacklisting sites that transmit malware.
- Theoretically, the image itself can contain malware, so you can get virus from google images but it would have to attack a vulnerability in a specific image viewer. Very unlikely.
- You can read ways that images might be unsafe at Watch out for photos containing malware, but this talks more about the use of an image to deliver a trojan horse executable.
If you are exploring questionable websites, the best thing to do is to explore them from inside a Virtual Machine or on a non-Windows machine (like a Linux liveCD) . This way, if anything goes wrong you can just kill off the LiveCD or erase the VM. Not much ordinary malware can jump VM barriers.
A quick test using "Inspect Element" in Chrome reveals: The image on the search results screen is raw base64 encoded data re-rendering of the image. That is totally safe. If you click to expand the image, the expanded image comes directly from the website in question. "View image" takes you to that same image on the screen by itself, exposing the site URL in the address bar. Clicking on the image or the "Visit Page" button takes you to the page containing the image.