Facebook has added a third security vendor to its growing list of partners tasked with reducing the risk of users getting infected with malware on the social network.
Slovakian security firm Eset has the honor of becoming the latest Facebook partner, following F-Secure and Trend Micro.
Facebook software engineer Chetan Gowda explained the new deal in a post:
“We've worked with Eset to incorporate their finely tuned security software directly into our existing abuse detection and prevention systems, similarly to what we did earlier this year with the other providers. Together, these three systems will help us block malicious links and harmful sites from populating the News Feeds and Messages of the 1.35 billion people who use Facebook.”
Specifically, if a user’s device becomes infected they will be notified with a message offering an anti-malware scan.
“You can run the scan, see the scan results, and disable the software all without logging out of Facebook – making it seamless and easy to clean up an infected device,” Gowda explained.
For those wondering why the social network needs yet another vendor to perform essentially the same job as F-Secure and Trend Micro, Gowda claimed that the greater number of providers would mean more malware is “caught and cleaned up.”
Facebook has been stepping up its efforts to make the site more secure for users.
Its efforts involve not only teaming up with security vendors to improve malware detection for users but also to ramp up the reward it pays researchers to find vulnerabilities.
In October the social network doubled its bug bounties for researchers uncovering flaws in its advertising code.
That same month, the firm announced it would scour the web for any stolen user log-in credentials that may have been publicly posted and notify them.
Research from Kaspersky Lab earlier this year found that Facebook was among the most popular site for phishers to spoof in an attempt to capture access credentials.
It claimed that the social network accounted for 11% of all instances when the heuristics anti-phishing component in its software was triggered – second only to Yahoo.