FB rids 2M PCs of malware

MUMBAI, INDIA: In the last three months, Facebook has rid more than 2 million PCs of its users worldwide, which were infected with malware.

The social networking major installed a new security tool from Kaspersky Lab to help detect and remove malicious software from the PCs of users connected to Facebook.

“Thanks to the collaboration with these companies, in the past three months we have helped clean up more than two million people’s computers that we detected were infected with malware when they connected to Facebook,” asserted Trevor Pottinger, Security Engineer, Facebook.

“In these cases, we present a cleanup tool that runs in the background while you continue using Facebook, and you get a notification when the scan is done to show you what it found,” he said.

Kate Kochetkova, Kaspersky Lab, in her blog post remarked that Facebook users are often targeted in online fraud schemes such as phishing, which are faked emails designed to get recipients to download malware.

“Facebook is a major aim for phishers: one in five phishing scams targets Facebook notifications. So be vigilant when you receive emails appearing to be from Facebook: as they can be fake. There are lots of Trojans targeting Facebook users as well,” she said.

Fraudsters may also use Facebook, Kochetkova said to like weird things and promote questionable goods and services on your behalf, she warned.