Facebook forges partnership with IT security vendor ESET

Summary: The goal of the alliance is to prevent malicious links from populating Facebook user News Feeds and Messages.

In a ZD.net article published today, it was announced that Facebook is partnering with ESET in order to make facebook links safer for all users.

http://zdnet.com/facebook-forges-partnership-with-it-security-vendor-eset-7000036362/

Facebook is well-known for home grown efforts in building its own data and IT infrastructures, but the social network is getting a little security help from a new friend.

The world’s largest social network has just announced a new partnership with IT security vendor ESET. The goal of the alliance is to prevent malicious links from populating user News Feeds and Facebook Messages.

To achieve this, Facebook will be baking in ESET’s security software onto its platform.

For end users, there might actually be a state of more heightened awareness. The ESET integration entails that if a device being used to access Facebook services starts behaving suspiciously with signs of possible malware infection, a message will appear offering an anti-malware scan.

A software engineer at Facebook, Chetan Gowda, explained the this approach makes security “seamless and easy to clean up an infected device.”

In his blog, Gowda explained that Facebook will look for malicious activity from the device being used to access facebook – if odd or malicious behavior is found, then the user will be offered a free scan to see if malware is present. More details in Gowda’s Facebook blog post – also dated 12/03/2014.