The Hacker's Guide to OS X

Chapter 6

Defensive Applications

Introduction

Hacking doesn’t always need to be offensive in nature. At some point, you’re likely to be in a place that puts your computer at risk. If you put your awesome hacking superpowers to good use, and implement appropriate defensive points on your system, you can stop an intruder, and potentially learn something new along the way.

When we discuss “defensive” in this chapter, there are a couple of different areas to be taken into account. The first area deals primarily with the configuration of our Apple product. The second area centers on using defensive applications to provide alerts or defend directly against outside attacks. Both of these are referred to as “system hardening,” and the goal is to protect ...