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I have got an image send by whatsapp on my android tabled, which I only can see when I press the download icon.

How can I see the image, without getting a virus when the image is malicious?

Are there some guides where I can run whatsapp in a sandbox or similar to download an image of an already received message? Or where can I get more info and help?

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    Hi @Marvhock. I think we may want to take a step back for a second. How do you know that the image is malicious? If you are 100% certain that it's malicious, how do you know that there is actually an image attached?
    – Dan Landberg
    Apr 4, 2019 at 20:51
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    In addition to the questions in the previous comments: if you know it is a malicious image or at least there is something unusual with it than why do you need to see it anyway? This is like asking of how to do Russian roulette without shooting yourself - simply don't do it in the first place.
    – Steffen Ullrich
    Apr 5, 2019 at 4:49
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    I think, if you see my example, when you expect the sender to have you as a special target and also he has connections to the organisations who could create customised viruses, I think chances are this custom virus could be unique, used only for some cases and don't get the developers attention. I believe some organisations have the power to always find leaks to hack you.
    – marvhock
    Apr 5, 2019 at 16:04
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    Is the sender known to you? If so, it might make sense to reach out to them through another channel to confirm that they indeed sent you that message. If not, you should probably take steps to confirm the sender's identity before you look into it.
    – Dan Landberg
    Apr 5, 2019 at 16:38
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    @marvhock, your example is a bit ridiculous. If it's to the point where terrorism or nation-state actors are involved, you DO NOT try to solve it yourself. You contact the FBI or the equivalent local entity. Thing is though, anything alarmingly titled is almost definitely a phishing attempt, and should be discarded.
    – Kevin Mirsky
    Apr 5, 2019 at 20:50

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Well, without asking why you know it is a malicious image and just answering your question, you could use a tool like VirtualBox and installing a virtual machine with any operating system, for example Linux, it is free. Then you could download the linux whatsapp client from https://github.com/miccar/wazapp. When downloading and opening the image, it can only touch the virtual machine, not the host computer VirtualBox is running on. Anyway, I don't think it would do anything bad on linux, because noone really bothers to create linux viruses because not so many people use linux.

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