Bitdefender Safego Review Part 1 – Security tool #1

For my first review I will try to make a comprehensive presentation of Bitdefender Safego. Safego (name which is a mashup of Safe and Ego)  is an application designed to detect threats on social networks, Facebook and Twitter, the Twitter app being in Beta stage at this moment. The software was released by Bitdefender, the Romanian antivirus software company, at the beginning of this year.

Accessing their website, located here, we can find a short description of their Facebook tool: ‘Bitdefender Safego protects your Facebook account from all sorts of e-trouble: scams, spam, malware and private data exposure. Safego also keeps your online friends safe and …close. ‘.

I will only talk about the Facebook component in this post and continue with the Twitter one in a later post, so that I do not create a long post.

You can access the actual software by either going to their website or by searching for it on Facebook. On their website you should click on ‘Safego on Facebook’ in the upper right part, while on Facebook you should click on ‘Go to App’ at the top of the page. Either of these paths will take you to this page.

From this text we can deduce that this app is using cloud-based technology to protect the users against scams, spam, malware and private data exposure in their social networks. Clicking on ‘Install App’ will take you to the permission request page, which is mandatory for all legit apps on Facebook.

As you can see, there are a lot of permissions that it wants to have, but most of them (‘Access posts in my News Feed’, ‘Access my photos’, ‘Access my videos’, ‘Access information people share with me’) are used to scan your account and find threats that either you or your friends posted, so it’s for a good cause.

Clicking on ‘Allow’ will take you further to the actual app (brace yourselves there are a lot of explanations to read).

In the column under 1 you can see the latest items that the app scanned. These items are taken from your Facebook news feed and contain both your updates and your friends’ ones. If a threat is found it is placed in the column under 2, suggestively named ‘Infected items’. If it finds a threat from one of your friends you will see the button which is under 3, which allows you to warn that friend about the threat. What is does it posts as a comment this text to that entry: ‘Oops! Bitdefender Safego says this post looks fishy! To check it, go to http://www.facebook.com/Bitdefender.safego/’.

If the threat is posted by yourself, this button will appear instead of this one and it will take you to the infected post so that you can manually delete it, should you choose to. It’s too bad that it can not automatically delete all the items that it identifies as being infected, but I believe that it is the Facebook API that does not allow that and not an issue with the app itself.

The app has a couple of Settings which can be found left to 4. These settings allow the app to publish a post weekly with statistics on the scanned items, as you can see below and to publish the warning text mentioned above.

The application will also analyze the Privacy status of the account, check it out above 5, which refers to the Pricavy settings in the Facebook account which can be manually accessed here. I believe that this option is not properly working as I tested on one account that had all the Privacy options set to Public and the Safego app said that the profile safe. -1 point here.

I have also encountered issues with the app not showing the latest items from my News feed, but that was cleared after clicking once on the ‘Refresh’ button. The Safego app also contains a link to the Bitedefender QuickScan ( which is a browser plugin designed to scan your computer for infected files ) and gauge that indicates how many of your friends is using the Safego app. I guess they introduced this to trick the user’s ego into increasing that number and inviting all their friends. Nice, but not impressive. Clicking on the ‘Go to App Wall’, under 6, you can access the wall of the software, where you can see their news and discuss with other users.

I have been using this app for a couple of weeks and I can say that it does a good job in identifying almost all Facebook threats. They have a false positives (items that are clean but are detected as infected) issue with items that contain the full text of a scam,but that is ok, from my point of view, as no one should copy the full scam text to another post. Unlike other security apps on Facebook, Safego does not allow you to manually check if a link is infected or not. I have also noticed periods when the app had a delay in scanning the latest items, and it only showed items from a couple of hours back.

If I can accept the small detection issues, I do not believe that the interface is a Facebook worthy one, as it is not very interactive. Most of the Facebook apps provide entertainment to the user to keep him/her interested in the app, but not this one. Showing statistics about the detected Facebook threats could not do anything but good.

The application has a 4.4 stars rating ( out of 5 ), based on the 322 people that reviewed it. You can find these reviews here.

As a conclusion for the Facebook part, Bitdefender Safego is a good application, an ‘honest’ one, but it has a lot of things to improve if it wants to reach a large number of users (they only have 60k monthly users, while the same app from Symantec boasts 850k – taken from their pages).

Stay socially safe and do not forget to visit our Facebook page available here or our Twitter account here (@scamwiki).