Makes sense
Online security company Websense announced today that it has become Facebook's first commercial vendor partner for web security.
From now on, when you click on a link in Facebook it will be checked against a database Websense has of naughty sites. If alarm bells ring at Websense then you get a warning message like the one below that gives you the choice of turning back, or at least finding out more about why the link may be dodgy.
This makes sense. Facebook is increasingly becoming the place people discover other things on t'Internet in general, as opposed to what their friends had for breakfast or for distributing holiday snaps. Anywhere there's we traffic the malware writers are bound to follow and it's not difficult to imagine the generic social prompts that would entice any of us to click on a dodgy link.
In fact it's rather surprising this is the first such announcement. Facebook presumably has some measures in place to ensure it's not hosting malware but, in its capacity as the gateway to the web for many users, it has a duty of care to ensure they don't access other malware sites from Facebook.
"Facebook cares deeply about protecting users from potentially malicious content on the internet," said Dan Rubinstein, Facebook product manager for site integrity. "We are excited about our partnership with Websense to provide industry leading tools to help our users protect themselves."
"Websense has been analyzing and classifying the internet for more than 15 years, and now all Facebook users will be protected by the same core technology that is used in the market-leading Websense TRITON enterprise security solutions," said Dan Hubbard, Websense CTO.
