And inside hidden is JavaScript code that when executed can take cookie information and send it to a URL address.
Among other things. At this time if you see an image please click the icon circled before clicking the link. DO NOT CLICK THE IMAGE. If you see anything suspicious, please report it immediately.
It is better a false report than a missed one.
In the interests of being wholesome and helpful, I used a secure method to retrieve the contents of that URL without providing my own cookie info.
I accessed and extracted the .png image directly using a similar method, then dug through it with a hex editor. As best I can tell, there's nothing particularly weird about the image itself or its metadata.
The HTML file pointing to the image contains a bunch of trackers from imgur. Google analytics, Facebook, scorecard research, etc. Those are certainly things to be concerned about, but I didn't specifically notice anything unusual beyond the ordinary corporate-surveillance crudware (which was indeed written in JavaScript). None of these were in the image itself though.
Obviously it's impossible to prove that anything is safe, and I only spent 10 minutes looking into this, so you should still follow the OP's advice about not clicking on random links without thinking. However my quick analysis did not find anything particularly alarming.
When getting chatgpt to decode the js, it spoke about a URL that went to a website ending in .zip/save in the interests of security I will not be posting it.
It wasn't solely the image that drew redflags but the js that appears to come before it. There is more to that URL than the file. I won't be posting the full details here.
In a DM I can provide if you would like to see it and analyse it further