What Is Imgur.io?
Imgur.io is a sister site to imgur.com. When you visit imgur.com on some devices, you may find it redirect to imgur.io. And when you visit imgur.io on some devices, you may find it redirect to imgur.com. These redirects are setup on purpose by the imgur.com owner. You should find the same content available on either domain; nothing changes to your user experience. However, we can still assess the domains seperately when it comes to malware scans and we should because the sites can differ on a technical level.
Website: https://imgur.io/
Is Imgur.io Safe?
I conducted a series of malware tests to find out if imgur.io is safe and legit. Here are the results:
I installed the Malwarebytes Browser Guard on my Edge browser and was able to browse the site imgur.io without any issues.
To check this further I ran malware scans with Malwarebytes and Spybot on my computer after browsing the site imgur.io and they returned no malware detection. I also ran a system-wide scan with Microsoft Defender and no malware was found.
To try to confirm that the site is clean, I also checked the site imgur.io on the online malware scanner Sucuri and it returned with no issues. You can see the same here: https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/imgur.io
Sucuri says it found no malware during its scan of the site imgur.io and that none of its associated security vendors have blacklisted the domain. Sucuri’s assessment concludes that the site imgur.io is a low security risk.
Some hardening improvements could be made such as adding a website firewall and solving the missing security headers listed below:
Missing security header for ClickJacking Protection. Alternatively, you can use Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors ‘none’. Affected pages:
https://imgurinc.com/about
https://imgurinc.com/advertise
https://imgurinc.com/careers
https://imgurinc.com/mobileappsMissing security header to prevent Content Type sniffing.
Missing Content-Security-Policy directive. We recommend to add the following CSP directives (you can use default-src if all values are the same): script-src, object-src, base-uri, frame-src
However, these hardening improvements don’t change the overall grade of the scan.
Lastly, I ran a scan with VirusTotal on the domain imgur.io and no security vendor has flagged the domain as malicious. You can see the same here: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/imgur.io
In conclusion, no malware was found and the site is not blacklisted according to Sucuri. Moreover, no security vendor associated with VirusTotal has flagged the domain as malicious.