Posts Tagged
Security
Today’s discussion is a classic one: are Macs really impervious to the malware threats so rampant on PCs? Due to the rapidly changing nature of technology and the ever-increasing acceptance of Macs, this is a question that needs to be periodically revisited.
We’ve recently seen Apple’s bulletproof security claims become quite tarnished in light of threats such as MAC Defender. Read on to see if you should be concerned.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of a tried-and-tested backup solution. One that ensures all your data will be safe – whether you suffer a simple hard drive failure, or your house burns down. This type of system gives you immense peace of mind, and removes that guilty feeling in your subconscious caused by not backing up.
Today I’m going to walk through a few options for creating what I would consider to be an “ideal” backup solution for the Mac. This is by no means the only way to handle the safety of your data, but one that’s particularly robust and cost-effective.
Last summer, my MacBook was stolen. It had no protection, no password, no data encrypted, and the thief had access to all of my emails through Mail.app. I even found out that the thief, or the subsequent buyer of my beautiful Macbook, had been using my Instapaper account to bookmark his own webpages! (I have changed my password since).
After that horrible experience was over and I had my new Macbook, some of the first things that I did with it were increase its security, and look into theft-recovery apps.
Anti-theft apps, or theft-recovery apps, provide you with useful information, like location and IP address, once your computer gets lost or stolen. Some even give you access to your computer’s webcam, and a few take care of the whole recovery process of your Mac.
Keep on reading to see some of our favorite apps!
Do you use a single password online? Have you have been using a handful of passwords for several years across any number of services? Or worst of all, do you rely on words that are found in the dictionary? Increasingly, these scenarios can not only put your personal information at risk, but they can endanger the information of your friends, employers and trusted network connections.
The solution to these problems is to use a different, hard-to-remember, complicated password for each website, service, or hardware device that you have access to. KeePassX is an advanced password manager for OSX that focuses on security and ease of use. For many I.T. professionals, KeePassX is an ubiquitous tool that allows free and open movement between secure services and devices. Created by Dominik Reichl, the open source KeePassX is the Mac version of similarly named KeePass for Windows.
Read on to find out how KeePassX improves on standard OS X password managing tools and why this free software is important.
Slowly but surely, awareness about backing up computer data is on the rise. Much of this attention toward backup comes from the recent crop of cloud based storage solutions. The problem with these online storage options is the unavailability of options to backup data over your own network or external drive. There’s also the time it takes to download data from remote servers when you need to restore.
Twin bridges that gap. Nowadays—especially if you’re a freelancer—there is a very high probability of having a web server for running your own website/blog, so why pay an additional monthly subscription for storage?
And in the case of small and medium businesses, there’s likely to be a network storage device or a bunch of RAID servers to use for your backup.
After the break, let us take look how Twin can help us back up data efficiently within our existing storage infrastructure.
There’s a good chance that you’ve made a significant investment in the applications on your Mac – if not in their purchase cost, certainly in the time you’ve invested making sure you’ve got the right apps to suit the way you work.
What would happen if you had to reinstall OS X or just switch to a new computer? Could you easily find your software registration serial numbers and reinstall your favorite collection of apps?
AppShelf aims to help you answer those questions with a ‘yes’ by keeping a list of all your software registration information in a central place, with the serial numbers or license files you need to reinstall if the worst happens.
MacKeeper has been a sponsor at AppStorm for quite a while now and many of you have probably seen the ads and wondered what the app is all about. Though we are in no way obligated to review the apps of our sponsors, this one is good enough that we wanted to share it with you.
Below we’ll go through the many features and utilities included in MacKeeper and discuss how you can use it to keep your Mac both safe and optimized.
My work requires me to keep confidential notes. I hunted around for some time to find the best way of doing this on my Mac, and tried several different options. What I used for a long time was password-protected entries in either Yojimbo, VoodooPad or Together. Unfortunately, in each case I felt something was missing.
I also tried Espionage. What I liked about this solution was the simplicity of making my notes in plain text files and dropping them into folders, which were then securely encrypted as a whole. I found, though, that I was prompted far too often to supply passwords to unlock the archives it creates so that online backups or other apps could interact with them. What I discovered instead was another app that did a similar job but required far less interaction: Knox.
Knox was already a well-established app when, back in May, it was acquired by Agile Web Solutions, the folks who brought us the excellent (and I would say essential) 1Password. After the jump we’ll walk through Knox’s main features so you can see if it matches your way of working.
Your Mac is a serious investment. You paid upwards of $1,000 for it, keep sensitive information on it and maybe even depend on it to make a living. Given all of this, would you be willing to pay $20 to protect it?
Today we’ll look at Hidden, a useful tool for tracking the location of your Mac in the unfortunate case of a theft. According to the Hidden developers, “the FBI reports that 97% of stolen computers are never recovered.” Will you be prepared if it happens to you?
(more…)
In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Hidden. The developer describes Hidden as the cheapest and most advanced theft recovery solution for your Mac. The FBI reports that 97% of stolen computers are never recovered. Hidden will provide you with the information you need to help you recover your stolen computer.
Read on for more information and screenshots!
