• Mac OS X,  Mac Security

    Disable Disk Arbitration

    In Mac OS X, diskarbitrationd is the process that handles mounting disks when they are inserted into the computer (eg – firewire, USB, etc).  Diskarbitrationd runs in the background, is always on by default and is started by launchd.  New disks inserted into the computer are automatically mounted, which you might not want to happen (for example, if you are forensically imaging a system, investigating malware on a device, attempting to fix corruption, simply trying to keep users that don’t know how to manually mount a disk from accessing one, etc). There are  number of ways to stop diskarbitrationd.  One of the easiest (and least intrusive since it doesn’t require…