If you follow Information Security at all or have been part of a PC vs. Mac discussion at any level, you’ve probably come across the timeless question of:

What’s more secure, Mac or PC?

Well, there’s an analogy from renowned security researcher Charlie Miller that elegantly captures the answer in a single sentence:

Mac OS X is like living in a farmhouse in the country with no locks, and Windows is living in a house with bars on the windows in the bad part of town.

In short, having a secure operating system and being safe are two different things. Exposure matters. So even though Windows is technically more secure, people using it are still less safe than if they were to use OS X. ::

diskutil is a very powerful utility within OS X that lets you do all sorts of things to the various storage media on your system. I use it to clear USB drives, since it’s really annoying to have to go into the .Trashes directory and kill the 501 contents (not to mention all the other artifacts, e.g. spotlight, cache, etc.)

So here’s a quick way to get everything off of a USB drive (or whatever kind of drive) using the OS X command line.

diskutil eraseVolume MS-DOS NEWNAME /Volumes/OLDNAME/

To add more security, consider adding in one of the following options:

• zeroDisk (Erase a disk, writing zeros to the media)
• randomDisk (Erase a disk, writing random data to the media)
• secureErase (Securely erase a disk or freespace on a volume)

Reference

[ The diskutil Manual | developer.apple.com ]

So I somehow just found out that you can manipulate OS X’s clipboard via command line. The utility that does it is called pbcopy (and pbpaste).

echo "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" | pbcopy

Now, go into any OS X application and perform the paste (⌘-v) command and you’ll have the content you placed there via command line. Or you can use the related pbpaste to output your content.

pbpaste  (to wherever)

Related

[ pbcopy / pbpaste | Mac Developer Manual ]

Problem: you need to manage a Cisco device via console, but the only box you have available is your non-macpro-mac, i.e. you don’t have a console port available. Solution: manage it via USB.

Step 1: Procure a USB to Console Cable

It should look something like this. You can get them most anywhere.

Step 2: Download and Install the Driver

Here is the project, and here is the download link.

Step 3: Find the Port On Your System

ls /dev/tty.*

One will have a name starting with PL. That’s your guy.

Step 4: Connect Using Screen

Now you just connect to it (think of this step as using Hyperterminal in Windows)–the only difference is here you’re using screen, giving it the terminal to connect to, and the speed (9600).

screen /dev/tty.PLXXXX-XXXXXXX 9600

Boom, you’re in. ::

I often have to explain to other IT people (and even too many in infosec) why I prefer OS X as my primary operating system. If you lack the time to make a complete argument, one shortcut to giving strength to your position is to give a list of well-known security professionals that have made the same decision.

So here’s the beginning of this list; if you want to add someone to it, you can do so in the following ways:

1. In the comments below
2. Email it to me at daniel@dmiessler.com
3. Tweet it to me with #macsec appended

And here are the people I know of off the top of my head (no particular order):

• Martin Roesch
• Mike Poor
• Taylor Banks
• Johannes Ulrich
• Chris Hoff
• Rich Mogull
• Jeremiah Grossman?

I know there are a bunch of others I’ve known and can’t remember at the moment. That’s where you come in. ::

Being in Information Security, I understand that knowing what’s going on is the first step to being secure. The way this translates to networked computers is knowing who they’re talking to.

And for this task I use Little Snitch to both monitor and control what applications are able to reach out from my OS X system.

In addition to being able to control what apps can do what (rule manager seen above), what I most like about this application is being able to roll over the menubar icon to see what apps are currently sending or receiving on the network.

So imagine you’re just writing something locally on your system, and you see that your Little Snitch menu bar icon is lit up (meaning something’s talking on the network).

You simply touch the menubar icon with your mouse and the window seen above appears to show you exactly what application is talking on the network.

This is invaluable. Nothing is more annoying to a good security person, or even a good sysadmin, than not knowing what on your system is putting packets on the wire. Little Snitch gives you this visibility, and if you’re running OS X I’d highly suggest you check it out. ::

[ Little Snitch | obdev.at ]

From the command line:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

[ For OS X Users... ]

First, enable US, US Extended, and Unicode Hex Input through the Input Menu tab of the International pane within System Preferences:

Now you can just hold down the ⌥ key from within any text-entry field and type the 4-character unicode designations for the following characters:

⇧ – 21E7
⌥ – 2325
⌘ – 2138
⌃ – 2303
⌫ – 2328
 – F8FF or ⌥⇧K

::