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About Me

Aside from the occasional initiation into the Dark Brotherhood, I spend my time telling people how to fix their Macs. Not that they are broken, but hey, every step closer to Linux is a positive one. Security and stability, brothers.

Monday, August 30, 2010

15 steps

One of the commonly touted advantages to using a Mac is that it's more secure and less prone to malware than a PC running Windows. It's easy to see where this attitude comes from: The prevalence of viruses and network attacks against Windows machines is greater by several orders of magnitude.

In fact, a recent Trojan horse hidden in a pirated copy of iWork '09 that circulated on peer-to-peer file-sharing sites was big news because it was the first Macintosh malware to be widely circulated on the Internet (though there have been a handful of proof-of-concept malware iterations over the past few years). But the much lower rate of malware and network attacks isn't proof that the Mac is immune to such things.

Indeed, there has been an ongoing debate over the years as to whether Mac users truly have more-secure machines or simply enjoy "security through obscurity" because they represent a relatively modest fraction of all computer users. While this debate will continue -- and there are valid arguments on both sides -- this article isn't about that debate; it's about a pair of simple questions: "How safe is your Mac?" and "How can you make it safer?"

The truth is that Apple Inc. does provide a pretty safe platform. The company leverages a number of advanced technologies to keep users and their data safe from harm. For a detailed list, see this Apple white paper (download PDF). But no system is perfect, and there are a number of security holes -- many of them easily closed -- that are common on Mac OS X systems. Here are 15 ways to fix the most frequently exploited security risks and protect your Mac.

4 comments:

  1. Thats why I prefer a PC, haha.

    navy274.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Don't have a mac yet, but might get it soon. If you have some advice leave a comment on my blog

    http://jeweettochzelluf.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great post, but I'll stick to pure linux

    ReplyDelete