Facebook teams with WebSense for more security

[Ibrad]

Facebook has teamed with WebSense to help provide malware blocking.

http://igl-security.blogspot.com/2011/10/facebook-adds-more-security.html

 

[Jack]

A really good move, that should have been implemented long ago. Facebook has 700.000.000 million users worldwide so usually scams regularly catch out hundreds of thousands of users at a time.

Websense's Spencer Parker had this to say on a interview for BBC News :

The protection will be powered by Websense's "Threatseeker Cloud", a system which stores a database of known malicious URLs.

The system can also detect unknown dangerous URLs by assessing threats in real-time.

This means harmful URLs can be blocked even before they are known to the company - cutting off a key tactic used by phishers in which constantly changing URLs fool database-driven protection.

In addition, the system will "follow" links made using popular URL shorteners - such as bit.ly and ow.ly - to verify their safety.

Due to the nature of how we interact with our friends, Mr Parker says phishing attacks on Facebook are much harder to prevent than other commonly used techniques.

"One of the things with Facebook, of course, is that you have that element of trust in a social network. If one of your friends posts something, you automatically trust it more than if it just received as a spam email.

"As more of these 'friend in the middle' attacks happen, you start to trust your friends less."

Via BBC News

 

[jamescv7]

Remembered Facebook partnered with WOT for security.

As main problem was URL shortener that can lead to viruses so its just a good news for more protection.