Bing warns Official VLC Player site as dangerous and Microsoft confirms its true [Updated]

If you now search for VLC player on Bing and hover over the first result, which is from official Videolan website, Microsoft Search engine shows ‘Site might be dangerous’ warning and suggest to choose another result, and offers a link to check ‘Bing Site Safety report’ for more details. The downloads button leads to outdated VLC 2.1.0 page.

Bing Site Safety report for https://www.videolan.org/vlc/, says the page is classified as suspicious and mentions ‘suspicious content was last detected at this URL on 25-11-2018’. The page further informs, the VLC website URL has been scanned over 16 times in the last 30 days and the last scan for URL was performed on December 25, 2018.

UPDATE November 30, 2018: Bing is no longer flaging vlc player site as suspicious and it’s site safety report is also confirming that now and seens as if the issue has been resolved.

Videolan is aware of Bing flagging VLC download as malware and expresses feeling they don’t know how to fix that and says the VLC 3.0.4-Win64.exe file has correct digital signatures.

Supposedly, @bing now consider vlc-3.0.4-win64.exe as a malware, which gives an annoying popup.
This appeared 2 days ago, and we have no clue how to fix it (yet).
We’ve checked, and the binary has not changed and is still correctly signed…
.
tbc…

— VideoLAN (@videolan) November 27, 2018

Microsoft Secure team on their website said they’ve analyzed “Attack that uses malicious Inpage document and outdated VLC Player to give attackers backdoor access to the target. So clearly Videolan is not aware that outdated VLC version is responsible for the warning as they’re thinking latest VLC could be the cause for this.

Searching the same URL with Google Safe browsing technology, that checks billions of URLs per day for unsafe websites, yields No ‘Unsafe content found’ result.

VirusTotal which scans sites and files with multiple antivirus scan engines, says URL is safe, but the latest VLC 3.0.4-win64.exe file when uploaded and scanned to VT, the service showed one detection of out 63. The engine which detected the VLC file as a trojan is Yandex and the community has submitted two unsafe votes for the same file.

While Bing and Google send notifications to webmasters when they show these type of warnings and allows webmasters to request for revaluation for malware on their site after they clean their site, we don’t know Videolan has done that or not.

Note: Microsoft has posted the information on November 8, 2018, and Bing is still showing the warning for VLC as of today.