The Mac OS X Firewall provides an optional ability to block all incoming network connections , offering a significant security boost to Macs that are located in untrusted networks or hostile network environments.
The Mac OS X Disk Utility app provides an ability to erase free space on traditional hard drives, which overwrites vacant disk space on the drive to prevent any potential recovery of deleted files (that is, files that have been removed traditionally, rather than through secure methods). For most users this is an unnecessary procedure, … Read More
Tor is a free anonymity network that aims to conceal a users location and browser usage from snoopers, in addition to allowing access to websites that are otherwise blocked or filtered out through firewalls. The official description of the Tor browser and network is described as follows: The Tor software protects you by bouncing your … Read More
Lavabit is a secure and encrypted email platform that has been getting a lot of attention lately in light of recent news events. Lavabit aims to prevent reductions of privacy, and so not only does Lavabit have excellent antispam and antivirus features along with your standard email niceties like autoresponders, its most relevant feature at … Read More
Standby mode is a power saving feature that automatically hibernates a Mac after it has been in sleep mode for a while, which it does to further decrease drain on battery. When a Mac using FileVault encryption is placed into standby mode, a FileVault key (yes, this key is encrypted) is stored in EFI (firmware) … Read More
iOS devices can use an optional encrypted backup feature that protects all backups with a strong encryption layer and password, meaning those backups are both unusable and unreadable without that password. If you chose to encrypt the backups of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with such a password and then somehow forgot the password … Read More
Need to securely delete a file, group of files, or an entire directory, insuring that it’s quite literally never recoverable by any known possible means? You can do this easily from the command line with the help of an incredibly powerful tool called srm. srm, as you may have guessed, stands for ‘secure removal’, and … Read More
Have you ever noticed how some apps will have information pulled from your iOS Contacts list, like peoples names, numbers, and contact information? Or, contrarily, how some apps should have access to your address book, but don’t, and are then feature limited? Though this happens by choice, it’s fairly easy to overlook these settings during … Read More
If you need to create an encrypted PDF with password protection, forget about buying Adobe Acrobat or other expensive software, because Mac OS X has you covered with built-in tools. Yes, the Mac can natively create secure password protected PDF documents, meaning it’s free, and it’s also impressively easy to do.
FileVault is an amazing disk level encryption feature that comes with Mac OS X. When it has been enabled, it encrypts everything, all disk contents, and actively encrypts and decrypts data on the fly, meaning any newly created data or document will instantly be encrypted as well. It’s fast and incredibly secure, using XTS-AES 128 … Read More
The next time you need a new randomly generated strong password, pull out an iPhone and ask Siri. Yes, the voice assistant that lives in iOS. You won’t find this trick in Siri’s own listing of commands list, but it’s a piece of cake to use and quite powerful.
You can retrieve forgotten website and browser passwords by using a command line tool in Mac OS X. This is a handy feature that gives you access to the Keychain via Terminal. How many times have you forgotten the password to a website? Don’t feel bad because it happens to the best of us. The … Read More
The newest Macs ship with a Recovery partition rather than a separate external reinstall disk, and if you’ve ever rebooted a newer Mac, iMac, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro with an SSD from the Recovery partition to reformat the drive, you may have noticed that by default the “Security Options” button is greyed out in … Read More
Two new updates are available for Mac users that aim to increase security and control over how the Java web plugin runs in the Safari web browser. Named as Java for OS X 2013-003 and Safari 6.0.4 (or Safari 5.1.9 for older versions of OS X), the updates are available right now through Software Update … Read More
Having been inundated with spam text messages and SMS lately on my iPhone, I went looking for a solution to put an end to it all. Though it’s not as simple as it should be, there is a way to block virtually all spam texts from ever reaching your phone, and it actually works. To … Read More
The login screen of OS X typically shows a list of users in addition to a variety of power options, including sleep, restart, and shut down. While most home users will want to keep those options available, there are many instances where hiding the power buttons is desired to prevent the Mac from going offline. … Read More
Nmap is a powerful command line network discovery utility that lets you review network inventory, host response and uptime, and perform security auditing through port scans, OS and firewall detection, and more. Though it’s free (and open source) and ships along with many versions of linux, it doesn’t come standard with Mac OS X installations, … Read More
Using the automatic log out feature is a good way to bring an additional layer of security to a Mac. It works just as you’d expect; after a predetermined amount of time has passed without activity, the active user account logs itself out. This means all currently running apps close out as well as all … Read More
