What Is YouTube?

YouTube (youtube.com) is a streaming and online TV site. In October 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. As of August 2023, the site youtube.com has an estimated 33.9 billion monthly views, according to SimilarWeb. The Wayback Machine estimates youtube.com was founded on April 28, 2005. The Internet Archive has saved the domain youtube.com 16,547,251 times between April 28, 2005 and September 17, 2023.

Is YouTube Safe?

I analyzed youtube.com for malware and malicious content to check if it was legit or a scam. Here are the results:

I checked the site youtube.com on the online malware scanner Sucuri and it returned with no issues. You can see the same here: Sucuri scan for the site youtube.com.

youtube.com VirusTotal results

See also: How To Stay Safe Online

Sucuri says the site youtube.com doesn’t have malware or any important security issues and is a low security risk.

Some hardening improvements can be made:

  • Missing security header for ClickJacking Protection. Alternatively, you can use Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'none'. Affected pages:
    https://about.youtube/
    https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en
    https://www.youtube.com/howyoutubeworks/policies/copyright/
    https://www.youtube.com/t/contact_us
    https://www.youtube.com/t/terms
  • Missing Strict-Transport-Security security header. Affected pages:
    https://about.youtube/
    https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en
    https://www.youtube.com/howyoutubeworks/policies/copyright/
  • 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 impact the Sucuri grade.

To check this further I ran a parasite scan with Unmask Parasites on the site youtube.com and it says the page is clean. You can see the same here: Unmask Parasites scan for the site youtube.com.

I also checked the site youtube.com on VirusTotal and it isn’t malicious. You can see the same here: VirusTotal scan for the site youtube.com.

youtube.com VirusTotal results

In conclusion, Sucuri says the site youtube.com doesn’t have malware. Unmask Parasites says the site youtube.com is clean of parasites. VirusTotal and Sucuri say the domain youtube.com isn’t malicious or blacklisted. Overall grade: Safe.