News
Facebook partners with AVG to help keep social networkers safe
October 2012 by Marc Jacob
AVG Technologies, the provider of Internet and mobile security to 128 million active users, announces its partnership with Facebook to help protect the world’s largest global online community from the latest security threats by providing data from AVG LinkScanner to help users avoid malicious web links posted by users on Facebook. There will also be the option to download the latest AVG AntiVirus FREE 2013 product, just launched last month from the Facebook AV Marketplace.
AVG AntiVirus FREE 2013 puts users in control of their Internet experience while offering great protection for social networking and other online activities. In addition, AVG’s dynamic detection engine provides further protection by scanning links posted to Facebook in real-time to identify if any of the links are malicious. AVG users are unable to post such links that could infect their Facebook friends.
In the AVG Technologies Q2 2012 Community Powered Threat Report, AVG revealed how Facebook, due to its huge popularity, is a target channel used by unscrupulous cybercriminals to scam users of the social network. Some of the threats AVG protects Facebook users against includes spam messages and socially engineered tricks to try to get personal and financial data from unsuspecting individuals.
In August this year, AVG Threat Labs identified an explosion of attacks using the notorious Blackhole Exploit kit that targeted Facebook users who were unable to log-on to their accounts or access any games or applications. Cybercriminals coordinated the attacks from multiple external advertising servers and used the social media channel Facebook to reach vulnerable users through malicious advertisements; these advertisements generated an exceptional increase from 250,000 attacks to over 1.6m recorded events within an eight hour period. AVG took swift action to protect its customers and ensure the malicious content was blocked.
