Facebook vows to address malware risk

Facebook is partnering with F-Secure and Trend Micro to offer an extra level of security in its quest to keep the service a safe place to network.

The company announced in a blog post that it would be adding malware detection and the opportunity to download and run either Trend Micro's or F-Secure's solution to remove the threat on computers, phones or tablets.

If malware is detected following a quick scan, the user will get a pop up with a recommendation from F-Secure or Trend Micro asking if they would like to use F-Secure's malware scanning and cleanup technology or HouseCall from Trend Micro to eradicate the threat.

Once the threat has been cleaned up, the software will remove itself from the user's system. Social networkers with an infected device are able to skip the malware removal, but they will be prompted later if a threat is detected again.

Chetan Gowda, a software engineer on the site integrity team at Facebook, wrote in the blog: "Although a single product isn't sufficient to defend against all modern security threats, the general recommendation persists because the technology remains effective in blocking categories of known threats and cleaning up malware infections if they find their way onto your computer.

"Since resolving a malware problem is a little bit different each time, we're committed to working with our partners to give people on Facebook the help they need in keeping their information secure."

Facebook has made user security one of its main focuses this year, introducing a ThreatData security tool which collects information about threats on the internet in arbitrary formats, stores the information and makes it "accessible for both real-time defensive systems and long-term analysis."