• Articles and Books

    Security Considerations When Selecting Cloud-Based Software

    My latest piece on Huffington Post: OMG the cloud! Everything must go to the cloud, and now! And sometimes finding a tool is about workflow. And the workflow should make sense and be awesome. But there’s an argument that you shouldn’t even keep a lot of data unless it’s kept confidential and therefore properly secured. The liability of keeping information about other people and what they do is just too great to outweigh what you might otherwise use that data for. Security matters. Workflow matters. And with the number of services out there that you can use for any given task, if any aren’t secure enough then there are probably…

  • iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    List of Safe Complex Characters for Passwords

    A number of systems require you to use complex characters in passwords and passcodes. Here is a list of characters that can be used, along with the name and the associated unicode:    (Space) U+0020 ! (Exclamation) U+0021 ” (Double quotes) U+0022 # (Number sign) U+0023 $ (Dollar sign) U+0024 % (Percent) U+0025 & (Ampersand) U+0026 ‘  (Single quotes) U+0027 ( (Left parenthesis) U+0028 ) (Right parenthesis) U+0029 * (Asterisk) U+002A + (Plus) U+002B , (Comma) U+002C – (Minus sign) U+002D . (Period) U+002E / (Slash) U+002F : (Colon) U+003A ; (Semicolon) U+003B < (Less than sign) U+003C (not allowed in all systems) = (Equal sign) U+003D > (Greater than sign) U+003E (not allowed in all systems)…

  • Business,  Mac Security,  personal

    Be A Good Patriotic American By Renting Sony’s The Interview

    Recently I’ve read a lot of things about the attacks against Sony. I’ve read that they’re nothing more than extortion attempts by hackers that probably live in their parents basements (based on the fact that the initial demands didn’t mention North Korea at all). I’ve read they were orchestrated by China by people who felt North Korea was being picked on and couldn’t stand up for themselves. I’ve read highly unconvincing reports from the FBI that they were orchestrated by North Korea. No one really knows. I can send traffic to servers from anywhere in the world. Anyone can anonymize their web traffic as easily as using a ToR plug-in…

  • cloud,  iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  sites,  Social Networking

    Link Baiting 101

    I almost called this article “Aliens Can Listen To Calls on Your iPhone” or “How To Hack Into Every iPhone Ever (Even When They’re Powered Off)”. But then I thought that maybe it would be a bit too much. I’ve been a little melodramatic at times, but that’s when I was younger and needed the rupees. But TechTarget isn’t young (although I don’t know if they need the rupees). I’d like to point out two recent articles of theirs: Zaphod wrote this chapter just to mess with you: Apple iOS Security Attacks A Matter Of When, Not If, IT Pros Say The Salmon of Doubt would be a much better title…

  • Articles and Books,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Foundations of Mac Snow Leopard Security

    I’ve been asked by a number of people whether or not we will be updating the Mac OS X security book I did a couple of years ago for Apress to Snow Leopard.  The answer is yes.  We are currently working on the updates and hope to have it available by December.  The book will undergo a number of changes/improvements, as all second editions should.  I’ll update when it’s available on Amazon & of course, in stores.