Facebook: Security or Marketing?

Last week Facebook made two decisions that could increase security for users of the service. The first change is the addition of an Antivirus Marketplace, a page on Facebook where anyone can find a list of antivirus solutions to download.

The second is a change in how its backend URL parsing utility works, in order to scan and eliminate malware threats that are linked from Facebook itself.

The first addition, the Antivirus Marketplace, is somewhat of a strange move. It’s available from the security portal, but isn’t currently promoted anywhere else.

This means very few users are likely to find it. While they are all free to try, those would cost money after a while, such as McAfee and Norton, if you get them from Facebook.

The second measure put in place by Facebook is likely to be far more effective. The company has always scanned URLs put into their system.

It’s well known that Facebook is a prime target of scams and can be a good infection vector, purely for its huge amount of users, so having the company proactively go out and scan addresses as they are shared is a big plus.

This is the type of service that can really help users, because it’s all done on the server side transparently, and doesn’t require any user input.

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