I visited a malicious link and I am paranoid

Question

I am a Mac User and while I was on youtube, I clicked on a url www.giftforfans .us I don't know what I was thinking but I got phished pretty hard... Now I am a bit paranoid and I am wondering if people's computer can get infected simply by just visiting this website... I don't know what the website does but I don't think it has downloaded anything on my computer on my download folder... Is it possible that this website somehow got my userID and Password of my email credential? Thanks for all the help

Answer 1

I don't think you have much reason to be paranoid.

Browsers are one of the best sandbox out there. Which means that anything that happens in your browser doesn't affect the rest of your computer. So theoretically, you could visit malicious link all day long and it would have no impact on your computer. That is, unless the attacker found a zero day exploit in your browser. So, not it probably didn't install anything on your computer. The nice thing about surfing the web is that it's very hard to infect your computer unless you deliberately accept to download/execute something.

About stealing your userID and Password, it is also unlikely. Unless you wrote them on this site yourself. Each browser has what we call the same origin policy. This policy restricts what one page can see. So, this malicious site cannot access the information that you entered on other site.

Answer 2

I do not think that this site was a phishing site because it is not directly linked to youtube. Also, youtube follows the HTTPS protocol and so your email credentials shall be protected by Youtube. Unless, you entered any private information into the website you should be just fine :))