BitDefender Launches Facebook Account Security App

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Romanian antivirus vendor BitDefender has launched a Facebook app, which allows users to scan their profiles for privacy and security problems, including spam and malicious links.

The application is dubbed safego and is currently a BETA product. Once given access to a user's profile, it is capable of scanning their wall, message inbox and comments for known malicious content.

In order to determine if an URL might lead to rogue pages, the application phones back to BitDefender's servers, where it is checked against the company's database of online threats.

Safego can also alert users if their profile privacy settings are inadequate and goes as far as to scan the news feeds of their friends for malicious content.

This gives people a chance to warn their friends and family members if they have fallen victim to one of the many scams and attacks circulating on Facebook on a daily basis.

"It's clear that a large number of people don't understand how much personal information they're sharing with the world.

"The BitDefender safego app makes it easy to identify what's shared and make the necessary changes," said Catalin Cosoi, head of the BitDefender Online Threats Lab.

On installation, the application asks for extensive permissions. These include accessing basic account information, sending emails to the address on record, posting on the wall, accessing the inbox, accessing posts in the news feed and accessing account data at any time.

Of these, only the first two are mandatory. The rest can later revoked later from the new applications management dashboad. However, doing so might seriously hinder its ability to properly detect malicious content.

The application also features a humorous quiz, called "Who's your evil twin?" which determines if a user's alter ego is a worm, trojan, virus, etc., based on their answers.

Users can have the results of the quiz posted on their walls in order to spread the word about the application and get more people interested in it.

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