Virustotal scan said url was clean. But when I clicked on the url, I was redirected. A subsequent Virustotal scan showed potential trouble.
 

A "friend" in Facebook sent me this link. h ttps://tiktok.fb3lite.com/rQaDYRw
(I put a space between the "h"and "ttps" so no one would click on it accidentally. LQ kept illuminating it as a link)

I ran the link through Virustotal and it came out clean. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/c...cd3f/detection

So I clicked on it but it took me to youtube.com

Suspicious of tiktok.fb3lite.com I ran it through Virustotal and it showed https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/4...9059/detection

I'm not very knowledgeable but I didn't like the looks of "base64-embedded" and "multiple-redirects." And when you click on "Details" it looks even scarier.


I am a bit worried. Do I need to be? Thank you.


PS. I am on a Linux computer (Xubuntu distro)

this is written at the top of the page:
So I don't think you need to worry about it.

???

Whether it's currently malicious or not, it's clearly a dishonest link, so shouldn't be followed/trusted on that grounds alone.

(It redirects to Youtube - why would they not simply provide the shorter and direct YouTube URL...?)

What did they say the link was pointing to?

I kind of feel the same way. But I'm still uncomfortable about it. Especially now I found out for sure my friend's Facebook account was hacked.

I agree with you. And now I found out my friend's Facebook account was hacked. But I entered the entire link into VirusTotal and it came back okay.

Obviously there are ways to hack your accounts, but this link is safe. You better be careful anyway.

FFS! No, the link is NOT safe. It has not yet been detected to be malicious, but not only has the domain clearly been setup to deceive, but the URL came from a compromised account.

It may be that whoever setup the redirect made a mistake and whatever malicious action should have occurred is not occurring.
It may be that they are simply testing the waters - seeing how many people follow such a link - or even attempting to determine real people from security scanners, so they can serve different content to each. (Or maybe they've already succeeded in that, and the security scans are false negatives.)
It may be that the malicious payload has a specific set of targets, and only fires for a particular range of IPs or user agents which have a known vulnerability, whilst simply performing a single redirect for everyone else.

Whatever the case, asserting that such a link is safe is irresponsible.

that assumption makes the whole internet twisty. But probably you are right.

Thanks guys. Considering that my friend's account was hacked I could not consider having clicked on the link safe. I clean installed a new version of Xubuntu.

I tried to google the link's domain, and my first few hits were for the other places you posted this: :P

https://www.techguy.org/threads/init...blems.1286083/

https://www.reddit.com/r/antivirus/c...an_but_when_i/

FWIW, I can't curl the URL, and whois says the domain was registered through namecheap.com.