Facebook Expands AV Marketplace

October 18, 2012

Facebook has added Avast, AVG, Avira, Kaspersky, Panda, Total Defense, and Webroot to its Antivirus Marketplace.

The social networking giant shared the following details:

"Over 30 million of our users have visited the AV Marketplace since its launch almost six months ago. Since then, we have been hard at work making your Facebook experience even more secure. We have implemented new phishing protections, and announced the launch of phish@fb.com, an email address available to the public to report phishing attempts against Facebook. In July we launched new malware checkpoints and provided users with the ability to self-enroll in these checkpoints to help keep their devices malware free.

Today, we are excited to announce the expansion of our AV Marketplace to include 7 new partners to our growing coalition of security companies. Starting now, Facebook users will be able to download software from - avast!, AVG, Avira, Kaspersky, Panda, Total Defense, and Webroot. Not only do we have new partners but also many of our existing partners - Microsoft, McAfee, Norton, TrendMicro, and Sophos – will begin offering anti-virus software for your mobile devices. You can visit the AV Marketplace now to download your free anti-virus software for PC, Mac and Mobile.

Our new anti-virus partners bring with them both the latest software and comprehensive intelligence. As with our existing partners, these seven companies will help protect Facebook’s community of over a billion users by improving our URL blacklist system. This system scans trillions of clicks per per day, and before each click, the system consults the databases of all our AV Marketplace partners to make sure the website you are about to visit is safe. This means that whenever you click a link on our site you are protected both by Facebook and 12 of the industry leaders in computer security. We will be cooperating with these partners more in the future, and look forward to announcing new tools soon.

These 12 companies join our existing partners on the Facebook Security Blog, where you can learn more about how to keep yourself safe and your information secure both on and off Facebook.

Effective security must be a cooperative effort; by adding these new partners to the Facebook Security family we are sure we can keep our community even better protected from threats both on Facebook and elsewhere on the web.

Be sure to head over to the Facebook Security Page, where you can find the new AV Marketplace, Facebook Security Blog, and other information on keeping your data secure. Be sure to Like the Facebook Security Page to receive the latest updates."