One of my favorite tools for penetration testing is Nessus from Tenable Network Security. Nessus 5 is the latest release in the family of vulnerability scanners that is probably amongst the most prolific. Nessus 5 does discovery, configuration auditing, profiling, looks at patch management and performs vulnerability analysis on a variety of platforms. Nessus can also run on a Linux, Windows or Mac OS X and can be used to scan and keep track of vulnerabilities for practically any platform, including Mac OS X. To install Nessus, go to the Nessus site and click on the Download button, around the middle of the page. Agree to the download agreement and…
-
-
Change SSH Port
I am getting so sick and tired of seeing brute force attempts against SSH traffic. Let’s just change the port that it listens on and then miraculously watch all those brute force attempts disappear. There are a few different ways to go about this in Mac OS X. The first is to just change the port entries in /etc/services (mileage may vary). To do so open /etc/services in your favorite text editor and look for the lines that begin with ssh. These should look something like the following: # Jon Postel ssh 22/udp # SSH Remote Login Protocol ssh 22/tcp # SSH Remote Login Protocol # Tatu Ylonen Just change…
-
All 3 Snow Leopard Titles Now on Amazon
All 3 of the Snow Leopard titles I’m working on, editing or in one case done with for Apress are now posted to Amazon and can be purchased.
-
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.
-
Automating NTP Setup on Mac OS X
The two primary aspects of time setup are typically setting the time zone and setting the Network Time Protocol (NTP) server. The systemsetup command can be used to set both of these date and time options for Mac OS X computers. To see a listing of the available time zones in Mac OS X use the systemsetup with the -listtimezones option as follows: systemsetup -listtimezones Once you have the time zones you can then use systemsetup with the -settimezone option to configure the time zone on your system. It is often easiest to simply paste the time zone into the command. So to set the time zone to Detroit for…
-
SANS Mac OS X Security Checklist
A project I worked on with the SANS Institute: https://www.sans.org/score/macosxchecklist.php