Ask HN: How do you protect your Mac?
I'm wondering what other Hacker News users use to protect their macs from viruses and malware?
1 comments
Personally:
1. I run as a standard user (without sudo access), with a separate administrator user (not named admin). I like Jeff Atwood's post on this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/the-windows-securit...
To sudo I have to first su into my administrator user, then sudo. This would have protected, for example, against the exploit a couple months ago that allowed a virus to change a user's password (and then sudo with the changed password).
For most graphical programs, I get a popup asking for my admin username and password if the program wants access to system files.
2. I use Chrome with plugins disabled by default. You can enable them permanently per-site (for youtube and hulu, mostly), and when a site loads that I want to run flash on, I just right click on the plugin to run it (or run all from the URL bar). There are probably similar options in Safari and Firefox
To sudo I have to first su into my administrator user, then sudo. This would have protected, for example, against the exploit a couple months ago that allowed a virus to change a user's password (and then sudo with the changed password).
For most graphical programs, I get a popup asking for my admin username and password if the program wants access to system files.
2. I use Chrome with plugins disabled by default. You can enable them permanently per-site (for youtube and hulu, mostly), and when a site loads that I want to run flash on, I just right click on the plugin to run it (or run all from the URL bar). There are probably similar options in Safari and Firefox