The problem with Facebook is thousands of active phishing scams but the social media giant has partnered with popular security software developer firm Kaspersky so that users could identify and remove malware from their computers.

Malware basically is used as an umbrella term as it includes all sorts of computer infections and viruses, Trojans, worms, spyware, ransomware, adware and similar malicious programs.

Facebook announced that the social network giant has been working for over a year with numerous anti-malware firms such as F-Secure, ESET and Trend Micro to provide free malware removal software to users.

In a Facebook post, Facebook’s Software Engineer Threat Infrastructure Team head Trevor Pottinger explained: “To make this programme even more effective, Kaspersky Lab is bringing their expertise to our malware clean-up efforts. If we detect malware on your computer, we will offer Kaspersky Malware Scan for Facebook among our other clean-up tools to help take care of the problem.”

Kaspersky Lab in the previous three months has been helping Facebook to protect its more than 2.6k users from malware.

Pottinger further added: “Thanks to the collaboration with these companies (Kaspersky and others), in the past three months, we have helped clean up more than 2 million people’s computers that we detected were infected with malware when they connected to Facebook.”

To counter such situations, Facebook offers a clean-up tool, which runs in the background as the user continues to use the website. When the scan is completed they receive a notification to show what was detected, says Pottinger.


He stated: “Keeping links to malware off of our platform is a core function of our security team… We use a combination of signals to help find infections and get the malware off your computer for good, even if the malware isn’t actively spreading spam or harmful links.”

Kaspersky has its reputation, but remember the company accepted it was hacked allegedly by Israeli spies using Duqu 2.0 Malware.