When we all play our part, we can help keep data secure

Around New Zealand, 2.7 million people connect and share on Facebook regularly and 80% of Kiwis on Facebook connect to a small or medium sized business on Facebook. Ensuring that this personal and commercial information is secure is essential to maintain New Zealand’s economic future and also, to give millions of New Zealanders peace of mind that their personal reflections and daily interactions are protected.

Shortly the Government will convene the country’s first Cyber Security Summit on 5th May in Auckland to bring together business and government leaders to discuss how we can all work together to keep the economy cyber-secure.

A collaborative approach between public and private is essential to promoting a more secure online world. Everyone has a part to play in keeping data secure, including each one of us.

At Facebook, as we work each day to protect the information of the 1.59 billion people around the world who regularly engage on our platform and the 50 million small business Pages, we take the approach that that security is everyone's business. We empower everyone who works at Facebook to play a role in upholding our culture of security. We build security in to our products and our platform, and work to create a secure ecosystemin collaboration with other companies and hackers. And finally, we develop easy-to-use tools for every to utilise to secure their own account.

To create a security culture at Facebook, there isn't a security team in one corner that just sets all the rules and tells people what to do. Every person plays their part. For example, we run live drills where we present security issues to employees when they may not expect them in order practice identifying and responding to threats.

We build security in to every Facebook product and design and design our security systems to anticipate any number of different threat varieties. Our security systems run in the background millions of times per second to catch threats and remove them before they ever reach you. Using Facebook also means you're getting strong encryption to protect your communications.

Keeping links to malware off our platform is a core function of our Security team. We go beyond one-off, 'whack-a-mole' removals to systematically combat malicious activity and do away with whole clusters of bad links at a time. This strategy works well, but to make an even greater impact, we begin a few steps earlier and help fix compromised computers when they connect to Facebook. Through development of automated systems and partnerships with security companies, we detect and block malware on Facebook. If we suspect that a person’s account has been infected with malware, we advise them to download free anti-malware technology to help them clean up their computer.

To create a more secure online ecosystem we collaborate with industry, sharing information to identify and neutralise threats. Most threat intelligence solutions suffer because the data is too hard to standardize and verify. To address this, we built a platform called ThreatExchange so that companies can exchange information about malicious sites and software. More than 250 companies globally now use ThreatExchange to make their systems safer and protect people who use their services. We all become safer as each company improves their defenses, and ThreatExchange is accelerating that process. We invite New Zealand companies to join ThreatExchange to help us all work together to create a more secure online ecosystem: https://developers.facebook.com/products/threat-exchange

Individual computer specialists and information security engineers can also participate to build a more secure ecosystem through our Whitehat ‘bug bounty’ programme. We invite researchers to let us know if they find a bug in Facebook and reward them, depending on the severity of the bug. We've paid over US$4.8 million to over 800 researchers since we started the programme in 2011.

And finally, we help individuals protect their accounts. It only takes a few minutes to run our Security Checkup over your account and make sure you're using all the security features you want. To learn more about Security Check-Up, visit www.facebook.com/security

Collective action is essential to protect New Zealand’s increasingly connected economy. When we all play our part, we can help keep data secure.

Mia Garlick is Facebook Australia-NZ's policy director.