AVAST Software has teamed up with Facebook to help you and your friends stay safe. AVAST is sharing its Virus Lab data with Facebook in the combined attempt to prevent malware being shared unknowingly by Facebook users. Whenever someone clicks a link within Facebook, Facebook checks the URL in the AVAST cloud, in real time. If the URL is infected, the user sees a message warning of the potential threat.

Nearly half of the world's Internet users log onto Facebook each month to share interesting things, play games, check in to shops and restaurants, tag photos, and most of all, connect with their friends. Facebook's networks of more than a billion people make it attractive to cybercrooks who try to gain access to our accounts and passwords. Once in, crooks use our connections to spread hoax messages or malicious apps to our friends, attempting to trick them into sending money or sharing personal information. Who among us hasn’t been curious about celebrity death rumors, tempted by free gift cards, or concerned because our friend was mugged and stranded in a foreign country?

“We’ve seen that the most prominent way of spreading malware now is through links to infected websites, rather than the traditional method of emailing infected files,” said AVAST Software CEO Vince Steckler. “Our Virus Lab has tracked about 2 million infected websites just in the last 12 months and the best way to stop these infections is to prevent links to them being shared.”

Over 160 million people use avast! for their PCs, Macs and Android devices, and they work together in a vast network of anonymous security sensors called CommunityIQ. These sensors provide information about possible suspicious files which allow new threats to be detected and neutralized almost as soon as they appear.

"Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our users and their data. Beginning today, Facebook will be able to leverage Avast's feed of malicious URLs to augment our existing site integrity systems and those in our community will be able to download Avast's software to better protect themselves and their devices. We look forward to working with Avast to provide an even more secure experience for those who use our service," said Joe Sullivan, CSO of Facebook.