No threats detected
All checks passed. This site appears legitimate — but always stay alert for phishing even on trusted domains.
Is causal.stat.berkeley.edu legit or a scam?
Legitimate UC Berkeley Statistics Causal Lab homepage with active academic news and publications, clean across all our antivirus and blocklist checks.
Analysis Summary
MT Intelligence
The site belongs to the UC Berkeley Causal Lab, featuring real faculty news like recent paper acceptances and grant awards. Our antivirus network shows zero flags from 91 engines, and browser blocklists are clean. The hosting IP has no abuse reports, and the page loads professional academic content with links to official Berkeley and arXiv pages. Reports of scams on subpaths like /ymy/video/ stem from a past DNS hijack, but the root domain remains unaffected and verified as official.
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site.
Visual Screenshot Analysis
We capture a fresh screenshot of the live page and ask a vision model to look for scam visual patterns — fake trust badges, countdown timers, overlay pop-ups, and visual clones of legitimate brands.
No scam visual patterns detected
The screenshot shows a fully rendered, professional academic webpage for the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics Causal Lab, featuring news updates, publications, and people sections with no scam indicators.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for causal.stat.berkeley.edu, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- Official website of UC Berkeley Causal Lab (aka Casual Causal), a research group in the Statistics Department focused on causal inference.
- Linked from UC Berkeley Statistics Department research page: https://statistics.berkeley.edu/research/causal-inference-graphical-models.
- Faculty includes Samuel Pimentel, Associate Professor in Statistics (CV: https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~spi/Sam_Pimentel_CV.pdf).
- Active with recent news: papers accepted March 2026, grants, hiring postdocs.
- Subpaths serving porn/scams due to hijacked dangling CNAME DNS record (Ars Technica, Apr 24, 2026). Main root site unaffected.
- Group members: postdocs, grad students, alumni at Stanford, UChicago, USC, etc.
- Ars Technicaopen
"Subdomain causal.stat.berkeley.edu has been hijacked and is serving explicit pornography and scam content, including pages like hXXps://causal.stat.berkeley.edu/ymy/video/xxx-porn-girl-and-boy-ej5210.html. All deliver explicit pornography a"
- Security-Portal.czopen
"Subdomains such as hXXps://causal.stat.berkeley.edu/ymy/video/xxx-porn-girl-and-boy-ej5210.html... All deliver explicit pornography and, in at least one case, a scam site."
Antivirus Engines
Security Scans
Checked against the major public blocklists used by browsers and security tools — no hits.
Contact Verification
We fetched the page and looked for real-world contact details. Legitimate businesses almost always publish an email on their own domain, a phone number, and a postal address. Scam shops usually don't.
- No contact email found anywhere on the page.
- No postal address visible on the page.
- Phone number listed (2024-2025).
- Links to 9 social profiles.
Domain & Encryption
Redirect Chain
- 1301http://causal.stat.berkeley.edu/
- 2301https://causal.stat.berkeley.edu/
- 3200https://causal.berkeley.edu/cross-domain
Server Reputation
Still, stay alert
No major threat indicators — but a clean scan does not guarantee every page is safe, and phishing emails routinely spoof real domains.
- Double-check the exact URL in your address bar
Confirm you are actually on causal.stat.berkeley.edu and not a lookalike like c-ausal.stat.berkeley.edu.com or an IDN homoglyph.
- Use a password manager
Password managers only auto-fill on the exact domain they were saved for — they refuse to fill lookalike domains, which is the single best phishing defence.
- OpenDiscuss this site on the forum
If you have first-hand experience with this site — good or bad — share it with the MalwareTips community.
Reputation Sources
How this domain rates across independent threat-intelligence and blocklist providers.
Referenced Domains
Outbound domains this page links to or loads resources from. Each links to its own security scan.
Safety FAQ
Common questions about this site, answered from the scan data on this page. These are auto-generated — not hand-written — so they always match the underlying report.
- Our automated security review found no threat indicators on causal.stat.berkeley.edu. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- causal.stat.berkeley.edu passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 94/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. causal.stat.berkeley.edu presents a valid TLSv1.2 certificate issued by Let's Encrypt · E8, expiring in 89 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- No. All 91 antivirus engines in our malware network report causal.stat.berkeley.edu as clean.
- No. causal.stat.berkeley.edu is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- causal.stat.berkeley.edu resolves to an IP operated by University of California at Berkeley in US (usage type: University/College/School). Hosting location alone doesn't make a site good or bad, but unusual geography for a brand's claimed country is one of many signals we weigh.
- We cache results for 24 hours. Signed-in MalwareTips members can trigger a manual rescan at any time using the "Rescan" button on the report page, which re-runs every check from scratch and refreshes this page.
Final Verdict
This is the official homepage of the UC Berkeley Causal Lab, a legitimate research group in the Statistics Department focused on causal inference. All our security scans are clean with zero malware or phishing detections. You can safely visit the main page.
Other Safe reports
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