Any malware powerful enough to overcome the defenses that Apple built to resist incursions may also be powerful enough to hide its traces. That’s not quite an axiom of security, but it’s generally true. If an attacker of any sort creates software designed to attack your system quietly, it typically tries to prevent security software and any other kind of inspection from noticing.
That’s very, very hard, and any exploit that’s sufficiently good at being entirely invisible is likely also good enough for a hacker to sell for a million dollars, with the advantage that the sale is probably legal in most places, and thus better than distributing malware that steals financial credentials or holds files for ransom. (I am not a lawyer, and that’s not legal advice.)
Such exploits, once discovered, are fixed at high priority by operating system makers, giving them sometimes short windows of utility. The more widely used the exploit is, the less likely it will remain available to use.
Download and install the best free apps for Network Tools on Windows from CNET Download.com, your trusted source for the top software picks. Network Monitor 3.4 is the archived version protocol analyzer and is no longer under development. Microsoft Message Analyzer is the replacement for Network Monitor 3.4. Microsoft Message Analyzer supports the latest protocol parsers for capturing, displaying, and analyzing protocol messaging traffic, events, and other system or application. Wireshark is widely acknowledged as one of the best network monitor tools available. Distributions are available for OS X. If you prefer something more simplistic you can use iStatMenus to show incoming / outgoing network traffic speeds. Winclone is a tool from Twocanoes Software that creates a clone of the Windows Boot Camp partition for recovery or migration to another Mac. (Pricing starts at $29.99 for an individual license.
Unless you’re a highly valuable targeted individual, it’s more likely that what you’d see is malware that doesn’t hide its traces that well because most people aren’t set up to look for it. This can be especially true in macOS and iOS. Most macOS users don’t run software capable of spotting malicious behavior; they rely on Apple. iOS can’t run anti-malware or other monitoring software at all. And Apple has stayed on top of the biggest risks to iOS as they’ve been discovered, whether as zero-days (found in the wild before being patched) or ahead of widespread use.
Because Apple doesn’t lock down macOS as tightly as iOS, it’s thus more vulnerable to less-severe assaults. To forestall a large category of attacks, Apple added a powerful baseline feature starting in OS X El Capitan (10.11). System Integrity Protection (SIP) locks down major directories associated with macOS and Apple’s preinstalled apps.
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But there’s a lot of havoc that can be wrought without accessing files in those paths, and while SIP appears well designed, it’s absolutely a target of hackers. To my knowledge, it hasn’t been broken through yet, but that never means it can’t.
This column is another entry in my series of how to deal with security as if you woke up and were a dissident in your own country. Assuming the unlimited resources of a government agency or security apparatus, any vulnerability that can be found will be, and it will be used as skillfully as possible for as long as possible. Protecting against such vulnerabilities helps you fight malware as well as government-led attacks.
Multi-pronged resistance
In the olden days, I used to run firewall software, anti-virus software, and some other protective extensions. OS X was young, and there had been malware for System 7, 8, and 9. However, Apple had a very small percentage of the market share, and hadn’t built OS X to allow its email software to execute code. Security through obscurity worked.
All of those different pieces of monitoring and protection software did slow things down. I gradually stripped them off, as I felt Apple had improved the OS or certain kinds of threats disappeared. Now, I find myself in the reverse position, layering amulets one on top of each other.
There’s still the risk of adverse interaction and system slowdowns, but the kind of monitoring that will serve you best integrates at a level where it’s examining what’s happening instead of churning away at tasks.
Best amazon s3 tool for mac. If you want to monitor and block potential adverse actions, I recommend these four areas, some of which have a single product offering, often cheap:
Network monitoring.Little Snitch ($35) is a sort of firewall, although it’s more accurately an app-based network activity filter. You can whitelist and blacklist permitted network behavior by apps and system components, and have an alert spring up before new ones are allowed. I reviewed the initial release of the current version in 2012; it’s been updated all the way to 3.7.1 since, and works with Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra (10.10, 10.11, and 10.12).
World edit tool minecraft for mac. Little Snitch can prevent malicious apps from reaching out to command-and-control systems they use to download full malware payloads or transmit information back to an attacker. Firewall apps from other companies take a different approach to a similar end, but I prefer Little Snitch’s conceptual framework.
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File-access monitoring. Designed in part to block potential ransomware from gaining a foothold in macOS, Little Flocker ($15 to $25) works at a system level to control which apps and system components have access to which volumes, files, and directories. You can set up rules or have it learn your system’s behavior, and you’re prompted to allow or deny attempts that fall outside permitted actions you defined.
Little Flocker operates under the reasonable proposition that few apps need unlimited access to read, write, or otherwise modify every user-accessible file on all mounted drives. Ransomware gets called out, because such malware encrypts typically only user documents, which have less protection than system files. But apps also shouldn’t be trying to read files other than those you point it at—especially an app the name of which you don’t recognize or know why it would be running.
There’s nothing else quite like it available. I wrote up a detailed preview of the 1.0 release in November. The app is $15 for personal use (up to five computers) or $25 for a single-user business license. it works in El Capitan and Sierra.
Persistent software installs.BlockBlock (free, still in beta) is another nearly unique app, monitoring for attempts to create system entries that allow software to be persistent, or relaunched at every reboot. One of the first thing malware does is try to make sure that even if it’s killed off during a session, whenever a computer reboots, it simply launches again. You can allow or block such attempts. (I wrote about BlockBlock in the same article that covers Little Flocker.)
Mic and video activity. Keeping outsiders from gaining access to your Mac’s mics and cameras is key in ensuring privacy, and that kind of access is more likely from government players trying to surveille you than plain old malware operators, who just want to steal. I’ve written two columns about this, one about audio and one about video.
Several apps, free and paid, can monitor whether an audio or video source is being tapped, but because that monitoring relies on the system properly reporting what’s happening, they’re much more likely to be disrupted by clever software. Tool for mac theft prevention. This is why those most at risk of A/V snooping remove mics and video (or put tape over a video camera).
You may feel like you’re being watched
Too much monitoring can be irritating. I was just watching some of the old “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads on the 10th anniversary of the launch of that multi-year campaign, and I saw the one that ridiculed Microsoft Vista’s excessively interferring security permission system.
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No Mac user wants to relive that. But the joy of the two more frequently invoked of the four categories I note above is that they’re rules-based and you train them. There’s a learning period after which you’re asked less and less often, because new behavior only arises from installing new apps—or from malware. The other two categories only intrude when either something happens: software tries to install a persistent component or A/V hardware gets invoked.
I’m using two of the above regularly (A/V monitoring and Little Flocker) and am easing into installing the other two. I know a number of people who run all four. The lack of overlap between them should keep bad interactions low.
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It’s a very exciting week for me and my team! This week I’m attending the SNIA SDC 2012 conference in Santa Clara, CA and this is where we will announce Message Analyzer. There are so many new features and aspects to discuss, but for now I’ll leave you with the official announcement:
Microsoft Message Analyzer has been released to the public, available here:
https://connect.microsoft.com/site216 (you’ll have to join the Message Analyzer and Network Monitor program to see the downloads and access other parts of or our site.)
As you might guess from the name, Message Analyzer is much more than a network sniffer or packet tracing tool. Key capabilities include:
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We are providing this beta release to give you an opportunity to let us know what you like and don’t like and where we need to focus our energy as we drive towards a mid-2013 RTM date.
Please install, take it for a spin, and send us your thoughts! There are “Report Issue” and “Community” buttons built into the ribbon, and we have a new blog here: http://blogs.technet.com/messageanalyzer.
(To capture at the NDIS and Firewall layers without running as admin, you must log off and back on after installation to pick up the necessary credentials. Please do this!)
Have a ball!
[update: adding a picture]
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