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Free app detects spam and malware on Facebook profiles

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Two University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) graduate students and a company run by an alumnus of the university have joined forces to develop a free Facebook application that detects spam and malware posted on users’ walls and news feeds.

Md Sazzadur Rahman and Ting-Kai Huang, both PhD students in computer science at the Bourns College of Engineering, created MyPageKeeper.org to provide real-time protection from viruses and phishing and spam campaigns for the 700 million users of Facebook.

They did so in conjunction with StopTheHacker.com, a web protection service founded in 2009 by Anirban Banerjee, who received his PhD in 2008 from UC Riverside, and Michalis Faloutsos, a professor of computer science and engineering at the university.

MyPageKeeper is a response to a recent surge of malicious activity on Facebook. This includes the distribution of fake links luring users into free flights on Southwest Airlines and videos of Osama Bin Laden’s death, and also news that 1.5 million Facebook user names and passwords were for sale on an underground hacker forum.

The application works by continuously scanning wall posts, news feeds and links posted by friends of participating users. As soon as malware, spam or other undesirable material is detected, MyPageKeeper notifies the user and enables him or her to remove the malicious content from their profile.

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