F-Secure ShareSafe: First Thoughts

 So as you have known I have blogged about BitDefender SafeGo a bit but SafeGo is not the only Facebook security app. Plus new Facebook security apps continue to come out. However F-Secure takes a different approach to Facebook Security, it makes it like a game and "rewards" you for good use. So what are my thoughts right now, lets take a look at the new app.

 At first it loads it's simple to use ui which is very clean and quick to load. As you can see their slogan is Stay Safe. Discover Stuff. Earn Rewards. That is an interesting approach to offer rewards for safe surfing but in my opinion its a good idea. The rewards will want to make people use the service in my opinion, however the rewards are not out yet so it will depend on what they are to if people will click on them.


 I decided to do a quick test by doing a Scan on the IGL-Security blog just to see what happened. Gladly nothing was detected as bad (as it should be :D ) and it let me add a comment then post to my Facebook Now looking over the F-Secure blog post on Safe and Savvy it is suppose to protect you from posting spam and malicious links. I am not sure if this includes links that Spam Apps post. So next I decided to put it for a test against some Bad URLS and Spam Apps

So I opened up one of my favorite malware url hunting sites MalwareBlacklist (from Paretologic) and decided to see how well it did. It did pretty well at preventing the sharing of those urls. So next I decided to test it against some of the spam apps that I found constantly going through social networks. While looking up "who viewed your profile" links ShareSafe did not detect any of them as bad but detected them all as: ShareSafe does not have sufficient information on the safety of this link. So overall ShareSafe did a pretty good job of blocking malware but it still needs a few improvements in detecting bad social scam posts. However it is in beta so it should improve over time. Update: I got a tweet from a staff member of F-Secure and they said ShareSafe uses heuristics on posts so even if it does not detect the URL it should detect the post. So I will keep my eye out for that I am still pretty interested in what type of rewards they will be offering so I will keep my eye out for that and will report when  I see them. I will continue testing and keep reporting back with what I find. You can check out the app here

 (Updated 9-6-2011 with information from F-Secure staff)