No threats detected
All checks passed. This site appears legitimate — but always stay alert for phishing even on trusted domains.
Is star-uci.org legit or a scam?
This looks safe to use.
Official UC Irvine research lab site with 18-year-old domain and clean security scans.
Analysis Summary
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site.
Visual 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.
Visual similarities noted — cleared by the overall checks
Our vision model noted some visual similarity to a known brand, but the domain, security records, and reputation checks confirm this is the legitimate site — so this is shown for transparency, not as a red flag.
What our vision model saw
1 signalScreenshot incomplete — site may be slow to render
Intelligence
The domain star-uci.org was registered in December 2007 and remains under the same registrar with no privacy masking. Our antivirus network returned zero detections across 92 engines and the hosting IP shows minimal abuse history. The page content explicitly identifies the site as the Social & Technological Action Research Lab within UCI's School of Information and Computer Sciences. External links point to official UCI domains and the evidence package confirms the lab's existence through academic citations and faculty references. The only anomaly is an incomplete screenshot, which is consistent with a JavaScript-heavy academic site rather than any malicious behavior.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for star-uci.org, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- The domain star-uci.org is the official website for the Social & Technological Action Research (STAR) Lab at the University of California, Irvine.
- It has been registered since 2007 and is extensively cited in academic literature, including papers from the National Academies and ACM.
- The site hosts research publications, project details (e.g., Estrellita, FamilyBloom), and profiles of UCI faculty and doctoral students.
- While there are reports of 'UCI job scams' on Reddit, these involve scammers impersonating UCI professors via fake emails; they are not related to the legitimacy of the star-uci.org domain itself.
- Verified UCI faculty members, such as Gillian R. Hayes, are explicitly linked to this domain in official university communications.
Associated with the University of California, Irvine (UCI) Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences.
Our research found the domain star-uci.org is the official site for the Social & Technological Action Research (STAR) Lab at the University of California, Irvine. It has been cited in academic papers from the National Academies and ACM. Verified UCI faculty members are publicly linked to the domain. Reports of UCI job scams on Reddit involve email impersonation and are unrelated to this website.
Domain Timeline
- Dec 19, 2007Domain registered
First appeared in WHOIS records — 19 years old today.
- Jul 13, 2026Latest security review — Reviewed as safe
This scan re-ran every check and found no active threat signals.
star-uci.org has operated for years with no threat signals in this review — a long, stable track record, though it is never a guarantee on its own.
Threat Detection
Antivirus Engines
Security Scans
Checked against the major public blocklists used by browsers and security tools — no hits.
Reputation Sources
How this domain rates across independent threat-intelligence and blocklist providers.
Technical Details
domain · encryption · redirects · server reputation · referencedThe plumbing behind the site — who registered it, how it’s encrypted, where it’s hosted, and where it links out. A valid certificate or a calm server doesn’t mean the business is honest — scam sites pass these checks too. Use this to corroborate the verdict, not to overturn it.
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://star-uci.org/
- 2301https://star-uci.org/
- 3200https://www.star-uci.org/
Server Reputation
Referenced Domains
Outbound domains this page links to or loads resources from. Each links to its own security scan.
What to do
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 star-uci.org and not a lookalike like s-tar-uci.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.
Final Verdict
This is the official website for the STAR Lab research group at UC Irvine. The domain has been registered since 2007 and is directly tied to the university's Donald Bren School. No scam indicators or malicious flags appear in any scan.
Safety FAQ
Common questions, 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 star-uci.org, so it appears legitimate. All 92 antivirus engines we queried report it clean, and the domain is 18.6 years old, registered on December 19, 2007 — established domains are far less likely to be scams. Even so, always double-check the exact address in your browser, because phishing emails routinely spoof real, trusted domains like this one.
- star-uci.org passed our automated checks with a trust score of 86/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged it at the time of the last scan, and its signals line up with an established, legitimate site. Treat any unexpected login prompt or payment request on it with the same caution you would anywhere.
- Yes — and this is worth understanding. Even trustworthy domains get spoofed in phishing emails (a fake message that only looks like it's from star-uci.org), and legitimate sites are occasionally compromised on specific pages. A clean verdict means the site itself checks out today; it does not mean every email or link claiming to be from star-uci.org is genuine. Always reach the site by typing the address yourself rather than clicking links in unexpected messages.
- No — all 92 antivirus and blocklist engines in our malware network currently report star-uci.org as clean. That's a good sign, though antivirus coverage is only one of the many signals we weigh, and brand-new scam sites can appear clean before vendors catch up.
- No — star-uci.org is not currently on the major browser blocklist feeds that Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge rely on. Note that blocklists can lag behind brand-new scam domains, so "not listed" is reassuring but not a guarantee on its own.
- star-uci.org is 18.6 years old, registered on December 19, 2007 through Bluehost Inc.. A multi-year registration history is one of the stronger signals against a scam, though it's never a guarantee on its own — established domains can still be misused.
- Yes — star-uci.org presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by Let's Encrypt · YR2, valid for another 43 days. Important caveat: SSL only encrypts the connection between you and the site — it does not verify who runs it. Almost all scam sites now have valid SSL too, so a padlock alone never means "safe".
- star-uci.org resolves to an IP operated by Unified Layer in US (Content Delivery Network). Hosting location alone doesn't make a site good or bad — but hosting that doesn't match a brand's claimed country, or that sits on networks known for abuse, is one of the many signals we weigh alongside the verdict above.
- This report is a record of the scan run on July 13, 2026, and the verdict reflects that point in time. Scam sites change fast — they can go live, get flagged, or vanish within days — so if you believe something about star-uci.org has changed, MalwareTips staff can run a fresh scan that re-checks every signal from scratch and republishes an updated verdict.
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