Facebook Partners with Websense

Looks like Websense scored a coup this week with the announcement that Facebook is going to use their Threatseeker and ACE (Advanced Classification Engine) technologies as part of Facebook's standard offering. Using Websense, anytime a user clicks on a link, it will get processed through Websense technology to determine if the link is malware or phishing, and display a warning appropriately if it's deemed malicious. There's also an opt out so if a user decides to bypass the warning, they still can.

It's good news for Facebook users, since any additional protection in today's malware heavy world is a net positive. But what's interesting about this announcement and perhaps something corporate users of Websense should take note of is, the inclusion of the the ACE technology in this announcement. By default, Websense's standard offering doesn't use ACE, it's an option that needs to be enabled.

We've talked about technology like ACE in other posts here on the Proxy Update, and definitely think any type of dynamic rating system for web sites is an absolute must for secure web gateways. So if you don't have it in your proxy or web gateway, you should investigate and consider turning it on, or moving to a technology that has this feature.