Spyware is generally something you don’t have to worry about on the Mac, but TheLoop is reporting that a company named ‘7art-screensavers’ is releasing malware on the Mac platform with a series of free screensaver downloads. Apparently the screensavers themselves do not include the spyware, but they attempt to download and install the “OSX/OpinionSpy” app … Read More
If you’re like me, you store a lot of information on your iPhone that you want to keep private. Accordingly, you might be interested to know that, by default, the backups made from an iOS device to iTunes are not encrypted, and can be dug through rather freely if someone was interested in doing so. … Read More
If you want to be absolutely sure your data is wiped clean with virtually no chance of recovery, by anyone, using any possible known recovery tools, look no further than Apple’s Disk Utility tool. The process is simple, and it can apply to any Mac drive, whether that’s an internal hard drive, external hard drive, … Read More
PeerGuardian is a free open source tool that allows you to easily block large numbers of IP addresses in Mac OS X. It automatically maintains an internal IP blacklist to block IP’s deemed unsafe or dubious in nature, and also allows for multiple IP lists with the ability to block entire protocols. Other features include … Read More
If you want to beef up the security on your Mac with a simple settings adjustment, you can enable the built-in software firewall. This offers a layer of protection by blocking many ports for common protocols, incoming connections, and other potential attack vectors. Generally, the Mac OS X Firewall is not necessary to use for … Read More
Want to find out how to see all startup and login app launches and scripts on a Mac? This article will walk through that process. Gone are the days of Mac OS System 9 where all startup items were sitting nicely in a system folder labeled ‘Startup’, now with the Unix undercore of Mac OS … Read More
In some situations, you may wish to disable access to the System Preferences on a Mac. Often this is for lab environments or public use workstations, or perhaps for locking down a particular workstation for various reasons. While a common approach is to create a new user account that has limited access to system features … Read More
If you need to prevent the Dock icons from changing or being modified on a Mac, you can use defaults command strings to lock down the OS X Dock and prevent any adjustments or changes to how it appears on screen.
You can set Mac OS X to always securely empty the Trash and add a significant layer of security when removing files from the Mac. This is done just by adjusting a preference setting within the Finder, and it’s very easy to configure, here’s what you will want to do to use this option:
Changing the iPhone root password is a good idea if you have Jailbroken your iPhone, it will prevent unauthorized users and applications from doing things you certainly don’t want them to do since the password is universal on all Jailbroken phones (unless it’s changed by the user). And yes in case it was not abundantly … Read More
I just came across a really useful QuickLook plugin called SuspiciousPackage that lets you inspect those .pkg package installer files that so many Mac apps and downloads come in. Using this plugin, you can determine if an admin password is required, how many install scripts are in the package file, where the installation locations of … Read More
Locker is a very simple Dashboard widget that does something Mac OS X should have included by default, it instantly locks your Mac desktop.
Update: Apple has fixed the exploit, the below link is preserved for posterity but no longer works to display anything abnormal. A few weeks ago, there was an active XSS Exploit on Apple.com with their iTunes site. Well, a tipster sent us the exact same cross site scripting exploit found again on the Apple iTunes … Read More
Adobe Flash cookies are not deleted when you remove your browser cookies, because they are stored independent of your browser, meaning Flash cookies from Safari are accessible via Firefox, and vice versa. The interesting thing about Flash cookies though is that they could technically track your web browsing long after you have left the site … Read More
You can securely delete files from Mac OS X right from the Finder. This is by far the simplest method to securely delete something on the Mac, and the process is pretty straight forward, very similar to the normal procedure of deleting a file except that you will access a separate option to enable the … Read More
Update: Apple has fixed the exploit! I imagine this will get fixed relatively quickly, but you can do some funny (and potentially scary) things with Apple.com’s iTunes Affiliate sites just by modifying the URL parameters. The modified Apple.com URL is formed as follows: http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/download/?artistName=OSXDaily.com&thumbnailUrl=https://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/themes/osxdaily-leftalign/img/osxdailylogo2.jpg&itmsUrl=https://osxdaily.com&albumName=Best+Mac+Blog+Ever Click here for the OSXDaily.com version of the XSS exploit on … Read More
Need to get around the boot level Mac firmware password? You can bypass a firmware password by doing a little bit of a hardware hack. There’s many reasons you’d want to get around firmware protection, but here’s why we got the instructions from an anonymous submitter:
You can easily check the MD5 Hash of any file on your Mac, all you need to do is launch the Terminal and type the ‘md5’ command and point it at the file you wish to check the md5 has for. How to Check MD5 Hash of a File on Mac First launch the Terminal … Read More
