Want to temporarily disable Face ID on iPhone? For iPhone models with Face ID, like iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Mini, iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone X, XS, iPhone XR, or iPhone XS Max, you may find yourself wanting to quickly turn off Face ID on iPhone so that it can not … Read More
TOR is a relay network which aims to increase your online privacy by attempting to anonymize web browsing activity. This is achieved by distributing your traffic across a series of TOR servers, which obfuscates your IP behind those Tor servers. While TOR is typically used on the desktop – you can read about using TOR … Read More
The iPhone defaults to showing message previews on the lock screen of iOS, revealing the sender name and message content text. Because of potential privacy ramifications, many users turn off message previews on the lock screen which hides the message content, but then to read the full message users have to go to the Message … Read More
Need to know what version of Gatekeeper and Xprotect are installed on a Mac? You can find this information through the command line of Mac OS. GateKeeper, MRT (Malware Removal Tool), and XProtect are all built-in features of Mac OS designed to prevent malware threats and other nefarious software from being installed or used on … Read More
Some of the more privacy conscious Mac users out there might put tape over their webcam or use apps like Oversight to detect camera activity. While either of those approaches can be satisfactory for many users (or considered totally paranoid and overboard to others), many advanced Mac users in the security community go a step … Read More
Though Mac users don’t usually have to worry excessively about “camfecting” malware and spyware, some security conscious users may find it nice to know if a process or application is attempting to access their computers web camera or microphone. With the help of a free third party security utility called Oversight, you can have your … Read More
Users can securely download a file from any remote server with SSH by using the scp tool at the command line. Essentially this means you can have a file stored securely on a remote server and transfer it to local storage without having to expose that file to the outside world, because scp offers the … Read More
For Mac users who encrypt external hard drives and USB flash drives, there may come a time when you want to remove the password protection and decrypt the external device. Decrypting an external drive allows all data on the drive to be accessed without the password authentication, effectively turning off any protection on the target … Read More
Gatekeeper in MacOS is now stricter than ever, defaulting to only allow options for apps downloaded from either the App Store or the App Store and identified developers. Advanced Mac users may wish to allow a third option, which is the ability to open and allow apps downloaded from anywhere in macOS Ventura, macOS Monterey, … Read More
Many Mac applications and downloads arrive as a PKG package file, but have you ever wanted to open a PKG file to view exactly what is being installed and where it’s going from the source .pkg? Assuming you get a .pkg installer from a trusted source like Apple there is generally nothing to be concerned … Read More
Some users may benefit from enabling Two-Factor Authentication with Apple ID to further protect and secure their devices and data, but sometimes people decide two-factor auth is too much of a hassle and want to disable the feature.
An iPhone contains huge amounts of detailed personal information about the owner, including emails, contact lists, banking information, personal notes, pictures, and much more, all of which most users want to keep private and secure. Fortunately the iPhone makes having a secured device pretty user friendly, and even novice users can take a few fairly … Read More
Touch ID is an undeniably convenient feature of the iPhone and iPad, allowing quick access to the device simply by placing a registered finger on the Touch ID sensor, which reads the fingerprint to gain access. While Touch ID is useful, some users may later decide they want to disable the feature on their iPhone … Read More
This guide will walk through setting up two-factor authentication for an Apple ID. Two-factor authentication requires that whenever a user is logging in to an Apple ID from a new untrusted device, not only must the proper password be entered but a secondary security ID code must be entered as well, which is typically delivered … Read More
Assuming you use FileVault or don’t have automatic login enabled on a Mac, anytime the computer is rebooted you will be presented with a login and password screen. For users who change their passwords often, or who are just on the forgetful side of things, a helpful trick can be to display password hints at … Read More
While enabling and using FileVault disk encryption is highly recommended for security-conscious Mac users with modern hardware and SSD volumes, some users may decide they do not need to use FileVault for a variety of reasons, or perhaps they just want to disable it for another purpose. That’s what we’re going to demonstrate here, disabling … Read More
Advanced users who spend a fair amount of time in the command line may wish to adjust their sudo password expiration to be more secure (or less secure, by extending the password grace period timeout). Typically this means removing any password timeout so that the default five minute password cache is abandoned, thus requiring the … Read More
Many Mac users running a modern version of OS X El Capitan have noticed the Secure Erase Free Space feature has gone missing from Disk Utility. What the “Erase Free Space” feature did (and still does in prior versions of Mac OS X) was overwrite the free space on a drive to prevent file recovery, … Read More
