Facebook Filters URLs with Websense Technology

A new partnership between Facebook and the security solutions provider Websense should further make sure that the social media network's members are properly protected against online threats.

"Facebook cares deeply about protecting users from potentially malicious content on the internet," revealed 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."

Basically, when a customer clicks on a link, an advanced classification and malware identification platform called Websense ThreatSeeker Cloud, will take the request and thoroughly analyze the location to make sure it's clean. If the website is detected as containing malicious elements, the user is warned but he's still allowed to continue to the web page at his own risk.

"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," stated Dan Hubbard, Websense chief technology officer.

"Every day, Websense Security Labs works to discover, investigate, and report on advanced internet threats that are designed to circumvent antivirus products. By providing real-time protection from malware, spyware, inappropriate content, data leaks, and spam, we make it safe for people and businesses to use the web."

The new addition to Facebook's protection policy has long been expected because of the large number of scams that circulate all over the social media site.

Zuckerberg's company is in a continuous improvement, but as we've recently pointed out, these upgrades also come with a number of issues that to some point affect the security of the customers. So far, it's a good sign that at least they're trying to keep up with these emerging problems.

Websense's solution comes after Zscaler announced the availability of a browser plug-in called the Likejacking Prevention Tool, that detects the legitimacy of Facebook elements contained in a web page.