Is This URL Safe?

Key Takeaways

Now we are often told not to click on links. Don't just click on a random link. But what happens if you need to click on a link? In other words, you receive an email, it looks like it's coming from a legitimate person, the URL kind of looks okay, but you're not sure, and you want to make sure. Well, here's one option. It's not perfect, but it is a option to try. It's better than nothing, and that is a VirusTotal. You can submit a file, you can submit a URL, or you can do searches on a domain IP address, etc., to check whether that URL or file, etc., is okay or malicious. Just be aware of this, however, by submitting data above, you are agreeing to our terms of service and privacy notice, and to the sharing of your URL submission with the security community. Please do not submit any personal information. We are not responsible for the contents of your submission. So, with that caveat there, notice you could put a URL in here. So, I'll just put in OpenAI as an example and click search, and we get a result saying that no security vendors have flagged this URL as malicious. You get a report telling you if security vendors are saying that this is a malicious URL or not. So, this is better than nothing. So, if I put a really dodgy URL in here, and I'm just kidding, let's say davidbombal.com, does this get flagged as okay? And notice here, no security vendors flagged this URL as malicious. This is seen as a good URL. Thank goodness for that. So, the point is is that you can submit files here, you can submit URLs if you're concerned about them being good or bad. Now, this isn't a catch-all solution, but it's better than nothing. You can check URLs here, you can check files and make sure that they're not containing malware, that they're not phishing websites, they're not bad websites, because that URL or file is scanned by a lot of security vendors. But just remember the caveat, you don't want to share personal information here. Your data is going to be shared with the security community. So, other people will know about this, but it is much better than doing nothing and just clicking on random links. The moral of the story is don't click on random links. I'll show you other good options in other videos, but this is better than nothing. Great website, VirusTotal.