I was reading an newspaper article this morning where someone had a macbook stolen from their home and the owner was able to lock it down. Never thought of this as an option, it didn't explain much regarding this. For the everyday owner of one what is the best option to do this if you were to loose your mac or have it stolen. Thanks for any security tips etc.
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Mac Security
- Thread starter MacBookpro2011
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Have a search for Apple's "Find My Mac" feature, or the third party Prey Project.
Have Find my mac active
Have FileVault active (SSD encryption)
Have an APFS encrypted partition
Have decent network protection (firewall on the Mac, on the router, IPS/IDS on the network edge)
Have good wifi security with guest VLAN
Have storage on a dedicated VLAN
Have IoT devices on their own VLAN
Have FileVault active (SSD encryption)
Have an APFS encrypted partition
Have decent network protection (firewall on the Mac, on the router, IPS/IDS on the network edge)
Have good wifi security with guest VLAN
Have storage on a dedicated VLAN
Have IoT devices on their own VLAN
Additionally, you should set a firmware / BIOS password on your MacBook, cant remember the "official" name for it but its the password that you set from the OS utilities menu during safe boot.
Here, this; https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204455
Its not going to help you recover the Mac per se, but its gonna help prevent the Mac being used by a thief by preventing them from wiping the OS on the internal storage. Even Apple themselves can't (wont?) remove this password and it essentially locks out any subsequent "owners" of the device from making system-level changes. Combine this with FileVault encryption, a user-account password, and being logged into an Apple account in your user so that Find My Mac works, and I think thats about the best you can do. Definitely keep all your personal data backed up (local storage volumes, Time Machine, Backblaze, etc.), treat all data on your portable devices like MacBook's as "disposable", so in the event of losing your device its not terrible painful to get a new device and start again.
Here, this; https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204455
Its not going to help you recover the Mac per se, but its gonna help prevent the Mac being used by a thief by preventing them from wiping the OS on the internal storage. Even Apple themselves can't (wont?) remove this password and it essentially locks out any subsequent "owners" of the device from making system-level changes. Combine this with FileVault encryption, a user-account password, and being logged into an Apple account in your user so that Find My Mac works, and I think thats about the best you can do. Definitely keep all your personal data backed up (local storage volumes, Time Machine, Backblaze, etc.), treat all data on your portable devices like MacBook's as "disposable", so in the event of losing your device its not terrible painful to get a new device and start again.
I was not aware of this, does this suggest that the HFS+ encryption is less secure? Or is it just to get people migrating to APFS?