Typical damage is heat damage. To estimate heat damage, you'll need to look at the amount of light going into the camera. Light reaching the sensor comes in approximately through a circle of diameter f/a where f is the focal length and a is the aperture number. As you stop down, the light reaching the sensor comes through increasingly smaller circles. But the only thing stopping it is the aperture blades which are as light-absorbing as the manufacturer can make them. And the shutter which is uniformly warmed for a leaf shutter and warmed where the image is bright for a focal plane shutter.

When the camera is reacting/metering with open aperture, you'll boil the shutter, when it is doing so with stopped down aperture, you'll boil the aperture blades.

Note that this does not require you to take a photograph: it is enough to aim the camera. For a DSLR, that's the main damage mode when not using live view. In live view, you might also damage the sensor, while in optical viewfinder mode you might also damage your eye.

The reason few people damage their cameras taking shots not explicitly aiming for the sun is that the sun will very rarely be accidentally in the frame of a tele shot while in wide angle shots the actual amount of light making it to shutter/aperture is much less because in f/a (with a being the aperture number of the widest possible aperture), the value of f is small.

The only reliable way of avoiding damage is to use solar filters which prevent light from even getting into the lens.