Saturday, June 14, 2014

How to make OS X more secure

There are two persistent myths about Apple's operating system that still lingers. Firstly: to OS X users do not have to worry about viruses, Trojans and other malicious rogue program. The myth has its origin partly in effective marketing and the fact that OS X for many years had a relatively small market share, making the platform to a less relevant target for criminals.

But as Apple's market share has become greater, interest in Mac OS X grown on network shadow side. In recent years we have seen several serious examples of how hackers are using weaknesses in the infamous web extensions Flash and Java to attack OS X devices.

mac os x secure


A serious example of this is the Trojan Flashback, which is estimated to spread over 600,000 Macs in early 2012. The malicious software was developed for the Mac computers that had older versions of the Java Runtime installed. Java Runtime is briefly the execution environment that, in addition to the operating system itself, needed for Java to be used on a Mac can.

When Mac users visit an infected website, they tricked to download a fake version of an installation kit for Adobe Flash. Once installed trojan then began to steal passwords and other sensitive information via the web browser and other applications, such as Skype.

Apple invests more in business


The second myth is that it will be difficult to incorporate OS X platform in secure enterprise environments. Through the years, Apple has had a least complicated relationship to business use. When Microsoft began shipping Windows 2000 and Active Directory, Apple had no real solutions either for managing user profiles or for connecting OS X cans to a corporate network.

But since then, it has happened a lot. In this article, we will tackle both myths. We do this by showing how you can use the built-in security features and third-party products to secure your OS X cans.
We will also give through how the IT department can benefit from mdm tools and open source applications, for example to configure devices, and push out security updates to a large number of Macs at the same time.