As social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter have expanded to include more of the online population, spammers and hackers have come along for the ride. Even the FCC chairman has seen his Facebook page taken over by a malicious program that sent spam to his friends.

Facebook and other firms have started responding to the problem, and on Thursday tech-security company Websense will announce software called Defensio that allows Facebook users to better police the comments appearing on their wall and fan pages. In addition to detecting and blocking threats such as phishing and malicious Web sites, the software lets users restrict comments that include profanity or adult content. 

The Websense software is one of several recent attempts to make Facebook more secure. Facebook in July announced a plan to make people whose accounts had been compromised go through a verification process before logging back in. Earlier this month, the social-networking site said it was teaming up with McAfee to offer the use of a free scan-and-repair program for users with compromised accounts — the idea, as PCWorld described it, being that “if your Facebook account has been compromised your PC may also be infected with malware.”

But Websense still has a ways to go to catch up to the rapidly evolving cons on social-networking sites. One scam that has been rampant lately involves compromising a user’s account and using Facebook’s live chat in an attempt to defraud the user’s friends. Dan Hubbard, Websense’s chief technology officer, said the beta version of the software does not include a chat scanner but that Websense is looking at that possibility.

Mr. Hubbard said the company expanded to cover Facebook because its customers — mostly businesses and organizations — were increasingly expanding their Web presence onto Facebook, and the software was made with them in mind. “More and more of our customers are actually opening Facebook to business usage and want to secure it,” he said. The beta version of the software, available on the Defensio Web site, is free, and Mr. Hubbard said later versions will continue to be free for most Facebook users, although Websense is working on a fee structure for larger users, such as corporations.

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