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.