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I keep asking this question and Mac people keep looking at me like I'm an alien, so I guess I'll turn to the HN community for this questions. What do you recommend as security software for OSX currently? How do you help secure your devices from public wifi and the internet in general? Especially for novice users?
I keep asking this question and Mac people keep looking at me like I'm an alien, so I guess I'll turn to the HN community for this questions. What do you recommend as security software for OSX currently? How do you help secure your devices from public wifi and the internet in general? Especially for novice users?
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I know that. Overwhelmingly in most cases it does help though, probably more than anything else short of air gapping the thing.
You can also install another OS. Putting an Ubuntu LTS or Debian stable on it will help you way more, compared to OS X 10.9.5, than any number of other mitigation strategies. Frankly, I'm way more comfortable taking my Windows 8.1 machine to public wifi hotspots these days than my OS X 10.9 machine.
I keep asking this question and Mac people keep looking at me like I'm an alien, so I guess I'll turn to the HN community for this questions. What do you recommend as security software for OSX currently? How do you help secure your devices from public wifi and the internet in general? Especially for novice users?
Security software is a band-aid on vulnerable software and users installing things they shouldn't. Part of the OSX security strategy is to minimize users installing things they shouldn't by making it difficult (enforced code signing, confirmations when opening an unsigned or new application). The other side is minimizing attack surface for exploits by staying up-to-date, not shipping crap like Java unless the user ex…
I'm seriously shocked. This is ridiculous. This looks like possibly the easiest root exploit ever discovered on a desktop OS (a one-liner in bash). Why in the world would they allow an env variable to write to a file in a setuid'd binary? I'm suddenly very glad I don't use my macbook as my main machine, but I guess I'll remove the set{u,g}id bits on newgrp for now. Don't know if that will break things, but it's bette…
Well there's always the classic "login -froot" bug [1]. Although, to be fair, you did say "desktop OS" and I'm not sure AIX exactly qualifies.
[1] http://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/projects/testing/vulner/18.html
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How can you be mad at Esser? He didn't put the bug there. He has nothing to do with this.
You forget your key when leaving for work, and don't lock your door. It was accidental, you have a lot on your plate. Your neighbour sees you didn't lock it, and tweets out, "Hey Mike at 321 Greyhat Bvld, you didn't lock your front door". He didn't send that to you as a text, he tweeted it. You come home, and you've been cleaned out. I'm sure we can all agree, you should have locked your door. Why be mad at your neig…
I don't mean to blame any individual human here, but I'm baffled at the process by which debugging environment variables were added to dyld without being carefully vetted for bad interactions with setuid binaries. This is a well-known easy place to screw up, and I'm surprised that someone was working on dyld without knowing that (although yes, humans forget things sometimes), and much more surprised that this made it past code review and into a shipping product.
This isn't a random screw up in regular software. dyld is security-sensitive; it's one of the small number of libraries that bears a responsibility to be paranoid about setuid.
chflags uchg /etc/sudoersOh man, I really want to do it on all the macs at the Apple store, and start a little botnet. Problem is, I don't really have any use for 10 or so rooted macs. I mean, I could rm them, but I'd never do that, that's mean. And I wouldn't feel good about using the camera, even though the computers are in public, it's icky. Perhaps a DoS? There's nobody that I dislike enough for that. I think I'd be so rich if I wasn't s…
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You can also install another OS. Putting an Ubuntu LTS or Debian stable on it will help you way more, compared to OS X 10.9.5, than any number of other mitigation strategies. Frankly, I'm way more comfortable taking my Windows 8.1 machine to public wifi hotspots these days than my OS X 10.9 machine.
... Unless you use Firefox.
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How can you be mad at Esser? He didn't put the bug there. He has nothing to do with this.
You forget your key when leaving for work, and don't lock your door. It was accidental, you have a lot on your plate. Your neighbour sees you didn't lock it, and tweets out, "Hey Mike at 321 Greyhat Bvld, you didn't lock your front door". He didn't send that to you as a text, he tweeted it. You come home, and you've been cleaned out. I'm sure we can all agree, you should have locked your door. Why be mad at your neig…
1) The person who left the house open was certain to get the message quicker because of the tweet than just a text. 2) It was possible to quickly and remotely lock the door. Apple can and should fix this bug very quickly, as that is certainly possible for them.