Is lua.org legit or a scam?
The official home of the Lua programming language, registered for over 26 years with a perfect security record and global academic backing.
Analysis Summary
No threats detected
All checks passed. This site appears legitimate — but always stay alert for phishing even on trusted domains.
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site. See full visual analysis →
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 the legitimate, fully-rendered homepage for the Lua programming language with no signs of scam patterns or malicious intent.
What our vision model saw
4 signalsOfficial logo for the Lua programming language
Navigation links for documentation, community, and downloads
Attribution to PUC-Rio university
Clean, minimalist layout consistent with official project documentation
MT Intelligence
The domain has been active since May 2000 and is universally recognized as the authoritative source for the Lua language. Our analysis shows zero malicious detections across more than 90 security engines. The site is hosted and maintained by LabLua at PUC-Rio, a major university in Brazil. It serves as the primary distribution point for official source code and documentation, with no history of fraudulent activity or security compromises.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for lua.org, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- lua.org is the official website of the Lua programming language, explicitly stated on the site and corroborated by Wikipedia, GitHub repository, lua-users.org, and multiple educational/technical resources.
- Lua is designed, implemented, and maintained by a team at LabLua, a laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at PUC-Rio (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); originated in 1993 at Tecgraf/PUC-Rio.
- Domain registered since May 2000 (over 26 years old as of 2026); site provides official source code downloads, reference manuals, books, and community links.
- No scam, malware, phishing, or complaint reports found specifically targeting lua.org; searches for "lua.org scam" return only unrelated results about Lua-based malware in games/cheats.
- Donations to the project are managed by Software in the Public Interest (SPI), a US non-profit organization, as an associated project; book sales via Lua.org also support development.
- Widely recommended as the authoritative source in programming tutorials, Roblox dev forums, Codecademy, Exercism, and academic references.
- Related but distinct projects exist (e.g., Luau at luau.org by Roblox), but lua.org remains the original language's home.
Maintained by LabLua at PUC-Rio (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro); donations managed via SPI (Software in the Public Interest), a US non-profit
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 phone number listed on the page.
- No postal address visible on the page.
Domain & Encryption
Redirect Chain
- 1301http://lua.org/
- 2200https://lua.org/
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 lua.org and not a lookalike like l-ua.org.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 directly from the scan data above — so the answers always reflect the latest verdict on this page.
- Our automated security review found no threat indicators on lua.org. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- lua.org 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. lua.org presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by Let's Encrypt · YE1, expiring in 82 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- lua.org is 26.2 years old, registered on 5/1/2000 through Gandi SAS. Scam domains are often freshly registered — a site under 6 months old warrants extra caution.
- No. All 92 antivirus engines in our malware network report lua.org as clean.
- No. lua.org is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- lua.org resolves to an IP operated by Micro Systems Marc Balmer in CH (usage type: Data Center/Web Hosting/Transit). 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.
- This is a permanent record of the scan run on June 20, 2026. The verdict and evidence above reflect that scan and do not change on their own. If circumstances around lua.org have changed, MalwareTips staff can run a fresh scan, which re-runs every check from scratch and publishes an updated report.
User reviews & comments(0)
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