The root user is a special user account with high level system-wide access privileges intended for system administration, monitoring, and in depth troubleshooting purposes. By default, root user is disabled in Mac OS X for security purposes, but if you need to enable superuser, this guide will show you how to do so in OS … Read More
Creating a password protected zip file is easy in Mac OS X and does not require any add-ons or downloads. Instead, use the zip utility that is bundled with all Macs. This offers a simple way to protect a zip archive file from unwanted viewing access, as when a user attempts to decompress the contents … Read More
Need to hide a folder or two on a Mac? A while back we showed you how to make invisible folders and to even how to make hidden folders in Mac OS X, but now we’re going to demonstrate how to turn an existing folder into a hidden folder.
If you’ve been following the Carrier IQ brouhaha and ensuing fallout, you might be interested to know that it’s very easy to disable the Carrier IQ service, logging, and reporting on iPhone or any other iOS device: Tap on “Settings” Go to “General” and tap on “About” Tap on “Diagnostics and Usage” Tap on “Don’t … Read More
Command line users who wish to add an additional layer of security to their keyboarding within Terminal app can find a helpful privacy feature built into the Mac client. Whether aiming for generally increasing security, if using a public Mac, or are simply concerned about things like keyloggers or any other potentially unauthorized access to … Read More
A wide variety of websites and online services are region restricted to the USA: Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, annual credit reports, some banks, the list is significant. Region restrictions are generally something you don’t notice until you need to access a website from outside the USA, and then they’re a huge pain. We’ll show you how … Read More
The iPhone can be set to always hide the dialing phones number from the recipients caller ID’s. That means that if you turn off the “Show My Caller ID” feature, every call you make will not show up on the phone number you are calling, offering additional privacy to phone calls made from your iPhone. … Read More
Private Eye is a free real-time network monitor app for Mac OS X that is extremely easy to use. Upon launching the app, you’ll start to see all open network connections by application and process, and you can then filter connections by app, monitor all open connections, or watch only incoming or outgoing transfer. Connections … Read More
iOS allows you to enable private browsing in Safari for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This feature is sometimes called “Incognito Mode” with other browsers, and essentially this lets you browse the web and visit web sites without saving a record of any browser history, cache, logins, or searches, and it prevents cookies from … Read More
Well here’s a security flaw in iOS 5 that will quickly get patched: anyone with a magnet (or a Smart Cover) can bypass the iPad 2’s locked passcode screen and access whatever app was previously left open. The passcode bypass was discovered by 9to5mac, who recorded a video demonstrating the security breach (embedded below). From … Read More
If you’ve installed a modern version of OS X and rebooted or ended up at the lock screen, you may have noticed that a new “Guest User” account appears at the login screen. This is not a full guest user account, if you select the Guest User option at login, the Mac will restart to … Read More
We recently wrote about the dscl utility and how it allows a Mac OS X Lion user to change a password without knowing the existing password. The lack of required admin authentication has since been widely reported as a bug, and a small Security Update will likely be issued by Apple sometime in the near … Read More
Renowned jailbreaker i0n1c, aka Stefan Esser, has put together a rather extensive presentation titled “iOS Kernel Exploitation” that explains exactly how jailbreaks work, ranging from how the exploits are found, how new code is injected into the iOS devices, how untethers work, and so much more. It was presented live at last months Black Hat … Read More
FileVault 2 is the all new disk encryption method that comes with Lion, and it’s more secure than ever, using XTS-AES 128 encryption on your entire disk, as opposed to just the user directory as in past versions. The other huge change that came with FileVault 2 is the significant performance boost, where using full … Read More
Think you have a secure iPhone password? Check this list, you might be using one of the freakishly common passcodes out there, and if so, it’s time to change it. These were compiled by an iOS developer who anonymously captured the passwords through his app: 1234 0000 2580 1111 5555 5683 0852 2222 1212 1998 … Read More
If you want to try out iOS 5 but you don’t have a developer account, you can do so using a crafty technique that takes advantage of a very simple bug in the Voice Over system. This has been confirmed to work on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS, but other iOS devices probably don’t … Read More
The malware protecting Mac OS X Security Update will automatically download and update it’s malware definitions list from Apple, but if you’re like me you probably want to know how to manually check if the malware list is updated or not. We’ll show you where the malware list is located on Mac, and how to … Read More
A recent anti-malware Mac OS X security update was released that defaults to automatically downloading and maintaining an active definitions list of known Mac OS X malware threats. This list comes from Apple and is likely a very small file that is transmitted to your Mac, imposing minimal bandwidth usage. For 99.99% of users, you … Read More
