Safe speed tests

TL;DR

All serious speed tests are safe to use.

 

Contents

  1. Theory
    A brief explanation of the difference between well secured and safe to use
  2. Practice
    An overview of our findings from various advisory "safe to visit" tools
 

Theory

When we talk about safe speed tests, it is good to know what we mean by a safe speed test. Otherwise, a question like "Is this speed test safe?" will never be answered.

To answer that question, we might as well ask ourselves a more general question: What makes a website safe?

Even more generally, you should start with the question: What makes a site safe?

Glass Ace (one of the many AI tools out there) has a nice answer to that question. At the webpage What can be defined as a safe site? their answer is: (...) a location that has been deemed free from danger, hazards, or risks that could harm individuals or property (...)

Safe is not the same as secured

When we try to figure out what makes a website safe, we often come across web pages that tell us how to tell if a website is properly secured.

How to recognize a well-secured website

There are many websites that try to answer the question: How to recognize a well-secured website? Think of sites like:

  1. How to check if a website is safe: an 11-step guide
    (...) Look for an SSL certificate (...)
  2. 15 Important Characteristics of a Good Website
    (...) A website should use SSL these days even if it doesn't sell anything (...)
  3. How to Tell Whether a Website Is Safe or Unsafe
    (...) SSL helps prevent others from intercepting and reading your sensitive information (...)
  4. How to Identify and Protect Yourself from an Unsafe Website
    (...) A secure website's URL should begin with "https" rather than "http" (...)
  5. Is This Website Safe? 6 Ways You Can Tell if a Site Is Legit
    (...) Look for the "S" in HTTPS (...)
  6. Tips for Recognizing Secure Websites
    (...) Always verify that the website URL starts with "https://" instead of "http://"". The 's' stands for secure (...)

It is striking that everyone advises to first check whether the connection is secure (the URL starts with https instead of http).

There is hardly any website that tells you how to find out if a website is safe to visit.

We have done tests regarding the security of speed tests (including the use of SSL by speed tests) which resulted in this list of secured speed tests. However, we do not want to know how well a website is secured, but whether it is safe to visit that website.

We do not want our device (our property) to become infected with malware like viruses and we value (our individual) privacy.

In short, we only want to visit websites that we can trust to be safe.

 

Practice

That's why we used a number of tools, which indicate whether a website is safe to use, to test whether speed tests are safe to visit. We used the following tools:

  1. Google Safe Browsing
  2. Trend Micro Site Safety Center
  3. Norton's Safe Web
  4. Palo Alto Networks URL filtering
  5. WOT's Website Safety Check & Phising Protection
  6. ScamAdviser
  7. VirusTotal
  8. MX Toolbox Blacklist checker
  9. Zscaler's Zulu URL Risk Analyzer

Findings

We have made the following findings:

  1. Safe Browsing site status of speed tests
    (...) Safe Browsing did not warn of unsafe content (...)
  2. Is this speed test safe? (Trend Micro)
    (...) none were marked as unsafe (...)
  3. Speed tests and Norton's Safe Web Report
    (...) All speed tests except TestMyInternetSpeed receive the Norton rating: Safe (...)
  4. Palo Alto Networks risk level of speed tests
    (...) All speed tests tested with Palo Alto Networks URL filtering have the risk level: Low-Risk (...)
  5. Speed tests trusted by WOT
    (...) all serious speed tests are trusted (...)
  6. Speed tests and their Scam Advisor trust rating
    (...) all tested speed tests have a high trust rating and are likely to be safe/legitmate (...)
  7. Speed tests flagged as malicious (VirusTotal)
    (...) not flag any tested speed tests as malicious (...)
  8. MX Toolbox blacklist check of speed tests
    (...) One third of the speed tests tested use an IP address that is on an email blacklist (...)
  9. Speed tests and the Zulu URL Risk Analyzer
    (...) all speed tests tested are benign (...)

TestMyInternetSpeed

Only two tools had a finding at TestMyInternetSpeed.

We believe that TestMyInternetSpeed, despite being a worthless website, is safe to visit. However, we do not want to tempt anyone to visit this website.

We understand that Norton and WOT advise against visiting this site. However, in our opinion, this is more because it is a "low content" website that does keyword stuffing than because it is simply an unsafe website (At least the url of TestMyInternetSpeed starts with https://).

One third on a blacklist

We find it surprising that a third of the speed tests tested use an IP address that is on an email blacklist. To use a speed test, it is usually not necessary to provide an email address.

All serious speed tests are safe to use

Overall, our final conclusion is that all serious speed tests are safe to use.

The only caveat we have is that we assume you won't give out your email address when running a speed test (even for extra services like checking your speed history).