What Is vk.com, and Is It Safe?

Last Updated on October 25, 2024 by Mathew Diekhake

VK (vk.com), which is short for VKontakte (in Contact in Russian), is the largest social media network in Russia and the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States). VK was founded by Pavel Durov and incorporated in January 2007 as an audio and video platform. In July of the same year, vk.com reached a user base of 1 million and 10 million in the following years. With its headquarters in St. Petersburg, VK has become the most popular social network service with approximately 100 million monthly active users as of 2022. Some of the features offered by VK.com are a messaging system, news, calls with no limits, video, and monetization for content creators and music, to mention a few. Additionally, VK is available in multiple languages and offers a tool to manage online community pages as well as celebrity ones.

ALTERNATIVES

Similar sites to vk.com include ok.ru, twitter.com, ya.ru, reddit.com, tiktok.com, yandex.ru, t.me, instagram.com, discord.com, and vkontakte.ru.

DESCRIPTION

It’s not unusual for the homepage of a social media network to be short on content, but vk.com had hardly any information for me to work with and I would recommend they added more information to help increase the chances of people signing up. I remember ever since the early days of Facebook it didn’t show hardly any information on the homepage which just goes to show how viral Facebook truly was. But I caution its competitors from trying to succeed the same way. I don’t think Facebook locking all information behind a sign-in page was one of the secrets to its success. I much preferred the way Twitter used to do it before Elon Musk took over, which was to allow users to read the Twitter feeds of users even if they hadn’t created an account yet. The average person didn’t understand what Twitter was or how it worked before they signed up for it.

HISTORY

As of March 2024, vk.com has 1.179 billion monthly views (1.2B, Feb 2023), acccording to Similar Web. The Wayback Machine estimates that vk.com was founded on May 11, 2000. The Internet Archive has saved vk.com 332,924 times between May 11, 2000 and April 13, 2024.

According to VK, it was released to the public in 2007. Traffic for the site vk.com started to skyrocket in 2011 and has been on a steady incline since.

Is vk.com Safe?

Here, I analyzed vk.com for malware and malicious content to check if it was legit or a scam:

I checked vk.com on Sucuri, and it returned with no issues.

Security hardening flaws:

• Missing security header for ClickJacking Protection. Affected pages:
  https://vk.com/404javascript.js
  https://vk.com/404testpage4525d2fdc
  https://www.google.com/chrome/

• Missing security header to prevent Content Type sniffing. Affected pages:
  https://m.vk.com/ for iPad’s UA
  https://vk.com/404javascript.js
  https://vk.com/404testpage4525d2fdc
• Missing Strict-Transport-Security security header. Affected pages:
  https://vk.com/404javascript.js
  https://vk.com/404testpage4525d2fdc
  https://www.google.com/chrome/

• The ‘unsafe-inline’ keyword in Content-Security-Policy is not recommended. Affected pages:
  https://m.vk.com/ for iPad’s UA
  https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/

I then ran a parasite scan with Unmask Parasites on vk.com, and it is clean.

I also checked vk.com on VirusTotal and MalwarePatrol flagged it as malicious.

In conclusion, Sucuri says btcgosu.com doesn’t have malware. Unmask Parasites says btcgosu.com is suspicious. VirusTotal says btcgosu.com is flagged as malicious by MalwarePatrol. OVERALL GRADE: Relatively Safe.

Links and Profiles

Website: vk.com