DEMO: Websense protects company Facebook fan pages from malware

Websense is one of 53 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2011 event taking place this week in Palm Desert, Calif. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Facebook is a place where people trust each other because it’s a friend network. But that trust can make people easy victims of malware, which can be easily embedded in messages or company fan pages. Websense’s Defensio 2.0 is aimed at stopping such malware from spreading.

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Websense is presenting its Defensio 2.0 product at the DEMO Spring 2011 conference in Palm Desert today. For its six minutes on stage, the company says there will be more than 500,000 successful posts of malicious links, spam, and unwanted content on Facebook. With Defensio, a company can protect its brand, reputation, prospects and customers.

San Diego-based Websense is an established, publicly traded security vendor. Its Defensio 2.0 product is specifically designed to improve Facebook security. The company says it wrote the application from scratch with help from the Facebook development team.  The application can reject inappropriate web links and filter out comments, detect harmful scripts and malicious code, and allow users to automatically manage comments with predefined filters. It can also deliver an alert when unwanted content is detected.

The company can also test your web page with one click of the mouse, and you can indicate if you want to block profanity. The application runs in the cloud. The application is aimed at companies with Facebook pages, but it can also work with user profiles.

Websense was founded in 1997 and went public in 2001. It has 1,300 employees and competes with McAfee and Symantec. Websense’s application is unique in that it is written specifically for Facebook. The initial product was released a year ago and it has now more than 15,000 Facebook pages protected. The new version supports new stream types such as photos, videos, and news feeds. The “test my page” feature is also new.