The social networking giant – Facebook has teamed up with Kaspersky, an international software security group to develop a tool capable of identifying and removing malicious software from user’s computer, an attempt to boost the online security and offer virus free web experience.
You may have noticed, at times we come across fake emails that entice users to download malware unknowingly. Such emails may harm your computer.
Moreover, phishing attacks have become a growing menace. These are usually difficult to detect as they are present in the form of pop-ups or spam.
Such Phishing scams tend to obtain personal information like usernames, passwords and credit card details, mainly for malicious activities are difficult to detect.
To avoid users open these harmful links or spam, Facebook has designed a new clean-up tool that silently runs in the background while you continue using Facebook.
This tool as the reports suggests, makes use of a combination of signals that detect infections and gets the malware removed from the computer.
Kate Kochetkova from Kaspersky Lab in a separate blog post said the following,
Facebook users are often targeted in online fraud schemes such as “phishing,” which are faked emails designed to get recipients to download malware.
Facebook is a major aim for phishers: one in five phishing scams targets Facebook notifications.
So be vigilant when you receive emails appearing to be from Facebook: as they can be fake. There are lots of Trojans targeting Facebook users as well”.
Thus, if a user gets any notification, the tool will scan that notification and determine if it harms your system or not.
Facebook official further reported that the social network giant’s collaboration with security firms in the past have helped it clean up more than two million people’s computers that were found to be infected with malware when they connected to Facebook.
