Privacy, Security & Virus Information

Facebook and McAfee Join Forces to Fight Viruses

Facebook, the social networking sensation have made a joint announcement with McAfee, industry leaders in virus protection software, to form a partnership that will be aimed at improving security for Facebook's more than 350 million subscribers.

This innovative new cooperation will begin immediately according to spokespeople from both companies. This new collaboration gets under way with McAfee offering Facebook users a free six-month subscription to their Internet Security Suite software. However both companies plan to make sure that the relationship between these two internet-shaping companies will goes far beyond that.

McAfee plan to work in close cooperation with Facebook to provide a rapid response scan-and-repair service which will be free of charge to Facebook users to rapidly snuff out any new malware threats as they raise their ugly heads. Facebook have become increasingly aware of the dangers that their subscribers may be susceptible tom and have adopted an increased security effort, including an automated process for detecting anomalies in Facebook users' accounts that will give an early indication of attempts to introduce malware or attempts at hacking customer accounts. McAfee's security team will now work with Facebook on this project.

In the event that Facebook determines a user has a security-related problem, an automated process will kick in that will display a message from Facebook informing the user that a remediation process is underway, and will also initially freeze the users account, until the problem has been analyzed and repaired. In the event that there is a genuine fear of viral intrusion, automatic password changes would be invoked, along with other possible security remediation processes, such as running a malware clean-up Barry Schnitt, director of policy communications at Facebook pointed out in the announcement of mutual cooperation with McAfee "Few people have problems today with Facebook," Schnitt points out. "But with social-networking worms on the rise, along with attackers looking to harvest Facebook passwords, there's a need to keep pushing harder on security protections."

Facebook initiated automated remediation of compromised accounts last July and Wednesday's expansion of the effort with support from McAfee represents its latest step in defending Facebook and the increasing number of people who subscribe to it.

MAfee's vice- president of global consumer marketing Brent Remai projected that the partnership will entail McAfee offering its Internet Security Suite software to Facebook users at a reduced price, also McAfee will be on call around the clock to help tackle new security threats that appear to be targeting Facebook users.

"We can block malware and reset passwords," Schnitt pointed out. "One thing we don't have direct expertise in is protecting PCs." And that is what the new Facebook-McAfee collaboration is setting out to do as a free service to try to keep the social-networking site virus free and safe for its many millions of users.

 
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