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Security specialist Trend Micro announced it is expanding its partnership with the social networking behemoth Facebook in an effort to provide Facebook users with a more secure online experience when using the site.
HouseCall is a royalty-free security solution designed to help detect malware and keep devices secure for Facebook’s more than 1 billion users.
Facebook users’ accounts and devices have the opportunity to utilize Trend Micro’s free anti-virus tools to scan and clean their systems.
The platform begins its scan on affected accounts of users who choose to download the scanner, and users will be able to continue using Facebook while the scan takes place. Once the scan is complete, a message will be sent to the user stating if the cleanup was successful or not.
The company said the scanning process enables users to continue to work online in a more secure environment without unintentionally sharing malicious content or being infected from unsuspecting accounts.
“HouseCall will give Facebook users an additional safeguard against the malicious attacks that interacting online can bring,” Kevin Simzer, chief marketing officer for Trend Micro, said in a statement. “We are pleased to partner with one of the world’s leading social media networks to provide a free solution that will help protect the online security and privacy of billions of users.”
The platform complements Facebook’s existing systems to mitigate the threat from hackers, spammers and other cyber-criminals by detecting and alerting users to malicious activity that could compromise user security and privacy.
Potentially infected users are identified and notified by Facebook with the option to download the free version of HouseCall, which will check for and remove malware.
“We use a combination of systems to help protect people using Facebook from threats like malware. Incorporating the malware detection and cleanup capabilities of Trend Micro HouseCall into these systems will increase our ability to perform this important work,” Chetan Gowda, a software engineer at Facebook, said in a statement.
In addition to its partnership with Facebook, Trend Micro also recently announced major upgrades to its Complete User Protection solution, which spans PC and mobile endpoints, email and collaboration, and Web security to enable integrated visibility and threat response.
The platform, which offers support for cloud, hybrid and on-premise deployments, includes application control, which enables category-based whitelisting and PC endpoint lockdown as an additional layer of protection against advanced malware and targeted attacks that evade signature-based defense.