The most recent update to OS X El Capitan brought a very small, but very interesting change to the Firewall features included in OS X. This new feature is called “Stealth Mode” and is designed to give you significantly more protection when operating on public networks. Continue reading
Category Archives: OSX
US-CERT Announces Critical NTP Vulnerability
Yesterday Apple released a security update for a number of critical flaws found in the NTP (Network Time Protocol) service that OS X utilizes. The most worrisome of these is a buffer overflow that allows an attacker to remotely send specially crafted packets to a system, resulting in them being able to run malicious code with the privileges of the ntpd service (system level privileges on OS X). Be aware though, since NTP is an open source protocol more than just Macs are affected. Continue reading
Mavericks Finder Slowness
I’ve had a number of coworkers report that their Finder has been behaving poorly since the upgrade to Mavericks. They have noticed that when opening a new Finder window, the window will remain blank and beach-ball for 20-30 seconds before filling in as expected, then seeming to work fine. I was able to resolve this issue by removing the Finder plist and restarting Finder. Continue reading