Hello once again for another edition of Tech Tuesdays! Yes, this week, it is finally a Tuesday! Haha. For today, I’m posting a PR sent to me from Kaspersky Lab featuring their latest free app for Facebook – FriendOrFoe.
Now I tried to understand the info sent to me on how the app works and here’s how I see it – FriendOrFoe is basically a free app that helps you keep track of your Facebook activity and protect you from potential threats. How do they do this exactly? Well, that’s the part I don’t quite understand. I think they monitor your activity to some extent in order to do this protection so it’s really up to you whether you trust Kaspersky or not. In their defense, Kaspersky Lab is one of the more known software developers. I’m saying more known because well, I’ve heard of them and I’m not exactly keeping track on who’s leading in the anti-virus department.
In terms of relevance, avid FB users might find this app useful. Since it’s free anyway, it might be worth giving a shot as we do tend to install apps to use on a trial and error basis. I know I do that a lot since there are apps that I think would be really useful for me but it turns out that they’re not really. I’m just thankful when those apps that aren’t useful are free apps instead of having paid for the app only to find out it really doesn’t suit you.
I think we’ll figure the FriendOrFoe app better though with the full PR:
Friend or Foe app: Keep your Facebook friends close — and your enemies closer
Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content and threat management solutions presents FriendOrFoe – a free app for Facebook that allows users to assess just how “valuable” their friends are, and even shows what others think of them.
The app will reveal which of those hundreds of followers are genuine fans, who reposts and comments most of all in a user’s circle of friends, as well as highlighting threats to social network users, and how to keep personal information secure.
For those who like using various apps to analyze their activity, Kaspersky Lab has created a tool for collecting statistics about Facebook activity.
FriendOrFoe displays how many videos and photos a user publishes, the number of likes received and lots of other stats that may be of interest to Facebook devotees.
FriendOrFoe is currently available in English, Russian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Mexican Spanish, Arabic, and Japanese. Kaspersky Lab promises to add to the list of languages in the near future.
“The largest social network in the world is bound to attract the attention of cybercriminals. More often than not, they are on the hunt for personal data and login credentials which they can then use to access such things as your mobile banking account,” said Evgeny Chereshnev, Head of Global Mobile Business Development at Kaspersky Lab.
“It comes as no surprise then that Facebook is the most popular target for phishers: in the first quarter of 2014, 79.5% of all social media phishing attacks targeted this particular service. Apart from the entertainment aspect, FriendOrFoe delivers an important message about the possible threats a user faces in clear, simple terms,” Chereshnev added.
Security advice from FriendOrFoe
Photos
The app prompts you to check any photos you’ve been tagged in – there may be some compromising pictures.
Check-ins
The app lets you see if someone has checked you in without your permission and helps clean your profile of any unauthorized check-ins.
App permissions
FriendOrFoe can review all the apps you are logged in to and show what permissions you gave them.
Search history
The app will show you all the people or things you’ve searched for on Facebook. You can’t stop Facebook from storing this information, but you can erase it.
The developers will be continually improving the app’s functionality in response to user feedback.
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About Kaspersky Lab
Kaspersky Lab is the world’s largest privately held vendor of endpoint protection solutions. The company is ranked among the world’s top four vendors of security solutions for endpoint users*. Throughout its more than 16-year history Kaspersky Lab has remained an innovator in IT security and provides effective digital security solutions for large enterprises, SMBs and consumers. Kaspersky Lab, with its holding company registered in the United Kingdom, currently operates in almost 200 countries and territories across the globe, providing protection for over 300 million users worldwide. Learn more at www.kaspersky.com.
* The company was rated fourth in the IDC rating Worldwide Endpoint Security Revenue by Vendor, 2012. The rating was published in the IDC report “Worldwide Endpoint Security 2013–2017 Forecast and 2012 Vendor Shares (IDC #242618, August 2013). The report ranked software vendors according to earnings from sales of endpoint security solutions in 2012.
