Facebook has partnered with Kaspersky to develop a malicious software removal tool that detects malicious software on your PC.
Facebook has revealed that it has with major security companies like Kaspersky to develop a new malicious software removal tool. The company announced that it has been using the said tool to remove malicious software from the computers of users connected to the social network. However, unlike Facebook’s earlier social experiments, all this was done with the users' consent.
Facebook said that over the past three months, it worked with Kaspersky lab, ESET, F-Secure and Trend Micro in order to develop this tool. Facebook’s security engineer, Trevor Pottinger said, "Thanks to the collaboration with these companies, in the past three months we have helped clean up more than two million people's computers that we detected were infected with malware when they connected to Facebook,"
Pottinger said, "In these cases, we present a cleanup tool that runs in the background while you continue using Facebook, and you get a notification when the scan is done to show you what it found." He said the tool uses "a combination of signals to help find infections and get the malware off of your computer for good, even if the malware isn't actively spreading spam or harmful links."
Adding to this, Kaspersky Lab’s Kate Kochetkova said that Facebook was a major roaming ground for phishers as one in five phishing scams are masked as Facebook notifications. Hence, if you end up clicking on a wrong link sent from via a fake account can get your PC infected. Now if your PC is infected and Facebook has “detected suspicious behaviour from your account”, you will be prompted with the following warning page.
Source: ET, Kaspersky blog
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Hardik Singh
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