A Note On Mac Security
I was thinking about you tonight. I did not want to mix this in with my normal beginning of the week update because well — half of those readers have Windows
A striking thought hit me the other day. Out of all of the security breaches, malware, viruses (whatever you want to call them) that have happened to my clients this year — ALL HAVE BEEN ON A MAC (and in one case on a Chromebook). None happened on the Windows platform. Do I think the Mac is becoming less secure? No. I think more people are using Macs than ever before and the hackers are finding more of a reason to target the Mac because of sheer numbers of potential targets.
So there are 2 things that I want you to do. Do them. Clients, you can send me a simple reply if you notice something unusual after going through steps 1 and 2 and I will reply back. (No charge for this brief e-mail checkup.)
1) In your browser (whether it is Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Brave – whichever you use) search from the address bar at the top. Delete the http://www.whatever….. and type in something you want to search for. Hit Return. The result should clearly be a GOOGLE page (or correspond to your default search engine.) If it doesn’t, you have a problem! Just let me know if you get a weird result.
2) Go to Finder >> Applications folder. Do you see any in there that you don’t recognize? I am not really asking about apps you don’t use — those can always be deleted later but ones that seem suspicious. (Apps you don’t need to report back to me on are — Word, Excel, Power Point, Outlook, One Note, Notes, Reminders, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iMovie, Garage Band)
Hopefully everything is fine but this is a good check up that you can easily do — and should do regularly to thwart browser hijacks and malware applications. If I don’t hear from you, I will assume everything is A – OK.