The social network has confirmed its intention to scan all posted links on the site for malware and racism in real time with their partner – Websense company.
”If the destination site is considered unsafe,” Websense explains, “the user is presented with a warning page that offers the choice to continue at their own risk, return to the previous screen, or get more information on why it was flagged as suspicious.”
Facebook has decided to use the ThreatSeeker Cloud system, which relies not only on blacklists of malicious sites, but actually scanning all referenced pages. Websense expects that this tool will not just scan all pages for malicious code, but in future will help to protect users from unwanted content, for example, appeals to racial intolerance and extremism.
This is a significant step forward to the system like Google’s one, which uses a pre-approved lists without real-time scanning. Meanwhile, Facebook has already established its own link checking system “web of trust”, which will continue on working together with Websense’s technologies.
