Facebook lets users get proactive with their account security

The security of any establishment is key to its existence, and extra thought and planning is put in to ensure it. And, if you’re a popular social network with roughly a staggering 900 million stronghold, then going the extra mile is certainly the way to go. Facebook, according to an official post have announced that while they earlier alerted a user, if they found any malware on their page, they are now expanding upon that premise. Users suspecting their device of being affected by malware, can visit - http://on.fb.me/infectedMSE or http://on.fb.me/infectedMcA to enroll themselves on either of the two given malware checkpoints - Microsoft Security Essentials or McAfee Scan and Repair. How this is different from the system that was earlier in place was that if you earlier suspected your device of being infected by malware, then you would either run an anti-virus on your device, or ‘wait until Facebook identified an actionable threat.’ Now, however, users can themselves pick the free anti-virus product and scan their devices themselves and keep it malware-free. 

Get proactive with your FB security now..

Users, currently can pick from two products that are on offer, i.e. - : McAfee’s Scan and Repair and Microsoft’s Security Essentials. Detailing upon this a little further, the post adds that McAfee’s Scan and Repair option will ‘download a small program onto your Windows computer to perform a one-time scan of your system for malware. It will not interfere with your existing anti-virus or other security products. After it scans your system, it will give you the option to automatically or manually remove the files it flags as malicious,’ while the Microsoft Security Essentials tool ’ is a full anti-virus product. Upon download and install, it will add anti-virus software to your computer that will continue to protect your system with the latest anti-virus signatures from Microsoft.’

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It was only recently that we first reported about Facebook’s plans. In that report it had been revealed that Facebook has set up a market that offers free anti-virus solutions. The market, that’s now accessible here offers five free security solutions from five very popular vendors. The solutions being offered are - Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition, Microsoft Security Essentials, Norton AntiVirus, Trend Micro internet security for PCs and Macs, and McAfee Internet Security. The versions available to Facebook users offers security coverage for six months. Of course, you can’t go about downloading all of the five solutions that are up for offer - each account is limited to just one security solution. The solutions are completely free for use. There’s a major announcement detailing the reason for this collaboration. 

The announcement detailed Facebook’s efforts at trying and reducing malware on Facebook by implementing all kinds of defense mechanisms as well as manually shutting down pages, apps and accounts that are up to no good. The tieup with these companies will now enable Facebook to build a database of malicious web pages, so the whole of the 900 million+ Facebook users won’t be exposed to them. Facebook claims that this filter now scans trillions of web pages a day. The Facebook Security Blog is put in place to keep its users updated on security updates.

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