Facebook Partners With ESET to Fight Malware

Facebook is teaming with security vendor ESET to improve defenses against malware.

The move follows a partnership Facebook announced in May involving F-Secure and Trend Micro.

“[F-Secure and Trend Micro] built free versions of their products directly into Facebook so that people could get the help they need without additional hassle,” blogged Chetan Gowda, a software engineer on the Site Integrity team at Facebook.

“Today, we are expanding those capabilities by adding the anti-malware technology of another IT security vendor, ESET,” he wrote. “A larger number of providers increases the chances that malware will get caught and cleaned up, which will help people on Facebook keep their information more secure.”

According to Facebook, if the device a user is using to access its services is behaving suspiciously and shows signs of a possible malware infection, a message will appear offering the user an anti-malware scan for their device. The user can run the scan, see the results and disable the software without logging out of Facebook.

“Glancing through headlines in recent months reveals that malware continues to be a persistent problem for governments, companies, and individuals,” Gowda noted. “With the potential to remain undetected on devices for months, malicious code can collect personal information and even spread to other computers in some cases. Compounding the challenges for defense, most people lack basic anti-malware programs that could protect their devices or clean up infections more quickly.

“We’ve worked with ESET to incorporate their finely tuned security software directly into our existing abuse detection and prevention systems, similarly to what we did earlier this year with the other providers,” Gowda continued. “Together, these three systems will help us block malicious links and harmful sites from populating the News Feeds and Messages of the 1.35 billion people who use Facebook.”