What is Upwork.com?
Upwork (upwork.com) is a freelance marketplace, where clients can interview, hire and work with independent talent through Upwork’s platform. For freelancers, upwork.com is a freelancer’s workforce, the place to find new clients, offer services, and make money on the internet. As of February 2023, upwork.com receives approximately 46.5 million monthly views, according to Similarweb. The Wayback Machine estimates that upwork.com was founded on February 29, 2000. The domain upwork.com was crawled minimally by the Wayback Machine in 2000, then again in 2011, 2013, and 2014. However, it wasn’t until 2015 that upwork.com received a booming growth of traffic, which has remained steady to date. The domain upwork.com was acquired by the merged company called “Elance-Odesk” in 2015 and rebranded the company as Upwork. In March 2017, the company reported 14 million users in over 180 countries, with annual freelancer billing of 1 billion dollars and raised funding of $168 million since its creation.
Website: https://www.upwork.com/
Is Upwork.com Safe?
I conducted a series of malware tests to find out if upwork.com 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 upwork.com without any issues.
To check this further I ran malware scans with Malwarebytes and Spybot on my computer after browsing the site upwork.com 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 upwork.com on the online malware scanner Sucuri and it returned with a 403 Forbidden site issue. You can see the same here: https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/upwork.com
According to Sucuri, the site upwork.com is a medium security risk. Sucuri presents this domain as a medium security risk assessment because the scan was unable to run due to a 403 Forbidden conflict. The scan failed at the http://upwork.com/ URL which means the entire site couldn’t be scanned. However, no associated security vendors have blacklisted the site as malicious.
Hardening improvements could be made such as solving the missing security header listed below:
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
As reported by Sucuri, upwork.com has a website firewall protection against website hacks in place. Giving its users ease of mind as this lowers the risk of the domain being compromised.
I also tested the domain upwork.com on the online service Unmask Parasites and it came back clean. You can see the same here: https://unmask.sucuri.net/security-report/?page=upwork.com
Lastly, I ran a malware scan with VirusTotal on the domain upwork.com and no security vendors have flagged this site as malicious. You can see the same here: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/upwork.com
In conclusion, the site upwork.com is a medium security risk due to a 403 Forbidden site issue which caused the scan to fail, according to Sucuri. Furthermore, no security vendors associated with Sucuri or VirusTotal have reported the domain upwork.com as malicious, and Unmask Parasites found no issues. 403 Forbidden site issues can be suspicious; however, taking everything into account, the site upwork.com is likely safe.