Facebook Protect, a program that provides extra protection and security to high-risk user accounts, is now rolling out to more countries, including India.
The program was first tested in the US in 2018 and expanded broadly during the US 2020 elections. The company plans to roll this out to nearly 50 countries by the end of the year.
“Facebook Protect is a security program for the people that are most likely to be highly targeted by malicious hackers or other adversarial threats.
These include human rights defenders, journalists and activists, and are often at the center of public debate. They hold governments and companies accountable,” explained Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security at Facebook in a media briefing.
As part of the program, those users who fall within these groups will soon start seeing a prompt from Facebook asking them to turn on the ‘Facebook Protect’ option.
The program is designed to protect their accounts against cyberattacks and also mandates that the users turn on Two Factor Authentication (2FA) for their accounts.
This requires an OTP either via SMS or a third-party authenticator app in order to access the account. Facebook Protect also monitors their accounts for additional security.
There are increased automated defenses that we enable on the backend to protect these accounts :
But Facebook Protect is more than just turning on 2FA for an account, which really all users can turn on.
“There are increased automated defenses that we enable on the backend to protect these accounts. It’s additional detection mechanisms that our systems and teams run. Accounts in this program are flagged within our systems so that if our investigators see, for example, repeated targeting of one of these, we know that there might be a particular risk if they were compromised,” Gleicher explained.
He revealed that so far more thans 1.5 million at risk accounts have enabled the feature. Out of these, nearly 950,000 accounts enrolled in two-factor authentication for the first time thanks to Facebook Protect.
Facebook says it has revamped the program from its learnings, especially those based in the US election. It should be noted that Facebook Protect mandates 2FA for at-risk accounts for journalists, human rights defenders, and activists. The company said they also want to strike a balance and make sure these users do not get locked out of their accounts, so it will make it easier to turn on 2FA.
One reason why Facebook is stressing 2FA, is because it remains an underutilised feature across the internet, despite the known benefits when it comes to protecting a user’s account.
It revealed that only about 4% of global Facebook monthly active users have adopted 2FA till November 2021, and this is in fact in line with what other companies have reported.