Social networking site Facebook is now ramping up its fight against annoying and harmful scam attacks by checking outbound links for malware and viruses.
According to a report by The Next Web, by using a system developed by security company Websense, the service will scan links as a precaution to protect users.
“A platform as popular as Facebook is naturally a target for attackers,” wrote Websense on its blog. “We have been working with Facebook and their security teams for a number of years in order to keep their users safe, but now we have integrated directly into the platform for an unprecedented security combination.”
Facebook has been seeing an increase in scammers who use the website to drive traffic towards internet scam sites and malware. The service will be using the new technology to analyze the links.
A warning page will explain why the linked site is considered malicious. Users can still proceed, but only at their own discretion. This is very similar to Google’s Safe Browsing technology, which is integrated into Chrome and Firefox.
In a survey conducted by Websense, 52 percent of businesses said that they have experienced an increase in malware attacks because of unsafe use of Twitter and Facebook. With 800 million users, Facebook has been a hunting ground for hackers and scammers.
The new move will give Facebook users an extra line of defense against attacks, but it is still best for users to avoid clicking links going to untrusted sites
via: ZDNet
