What Is Yandex.kz?
Yandex.kz is a search engine and a sister site to yandex.com. The Yandex brand is one of the most popular search engines in the world and the most used search engine in Russia due to its focus on the native Russian language (Russian Russki yazyk). Some people use yandex.kz for streaming. As of December 2022, the site yandex.kz gets an estimated 69.1 million monthly views, according to SimilarWeb. The Wayback Machine estimates yandex.kz was founded on June 4, 2004. It has been heavily trafficked since roughly 2014. A site like mine gets most of its traffic from search engines. And only recently have I noticed traffic coming from any of Yandex’s domains. Today I get roughly 1% of my traffic from Yandex. I’m happy Yandex exists and trust it as a search engine. That said, I have also run malware tests on it and the results are below.
Website: https://yandex.kz/
Is Yandex.kz Safe?
I conducted a series of malware tests to find out if Yandex.kz 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 yandex.kz without any issues.
To check this further I ran malware scans with Malwarebytes and Spybot on my computer after browsing the site yandex.kz 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 yandex.kz on the online malware scanner Sucuri and it returned with no issues.
You can see the same here: Sucuri scan for the site yandex.kz.
Sucuri says the site yandex.kz has no malware and is not blacklisted by any associated security vendors. Sucuri says the site yandex.kz has a redirect but we can see the redirect is only to a captcha screen to prevent spam, so this is not an issue. Overall, Sucuri grades the site yandex.kz as a low security risk.
The site yandex.kz already uses a website firewall to prevent hacks and DDoS attacks; however, some improvements could be made regarding missing security headers. I have listed the missing security headers below:
Missing security header for ClickJacking Protection. Alternatively, you can use Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors ‘none’.
Missing Strict-Transport-Security security header.
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
Lastly, I ran a malware scan with VirusTotal on the domain yandex.kz and no security vendor has flagged the domain as malicious. You can see the same here: VirusTotal scan for the domain yandex.kz.
In conclusion, the site yandex.kz is safe to visit. No malware was found on the domain and it is not blacklisted by any domain according to Sucuri. Moreover, VirusTotal says no security vendors have flagged the domain as malicious.