What processes in a computer are vulnerable when opening a harmful file from the internet?

Question

What processes in a computer are vulnerable when opening a harmful file from the internet?

In: 3

Answer 1

All of them.

Unlike on cell phones, there’s really nothing that restricts what a random application downloaded from the internet can do. The restrictions that exist are [unhelpful and not relevant](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/authorization.png) to most people.

So my ELI5 advice to downloading random suspicious stuff off the internet is “don’t”.

Technically you can protect yourself, but that takes special work and knowledge. A virtual machine, or something like a fully clean, unused for anything else laptop can be helpful. But it’s still possible to go wrong there quite easily.