Replies

LOL... Ahhh..., good, then. That’s a really nice computer to have.

Okay, get “Little Snitch. Run that and all your connections will need to be okayed by you, or you can set rules to pre-approved certain ones and not others. It will operate on the “processes” that you see in Activity Monitor window.

Little Snitch
http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

I also use IPNetMonitor, and keep a window open over on the side that shows any network activity. If I see something going on (and I don’t think there is supposed to be any), then I can check both Little Snitch (which shows the live connections at the time) and also “Activity Monitor” (a program included by Apple, already there).

IPNetMonitor
http://www.sustworks.com/site/prod_ipmonitor.html

This one will do all sorts of TCP/IP checks and test. You can do a dump of all your connections going on at the time and see exactly what each one is doing (if you want).

Also, I use “The DoorStop X Security Suite”
http://www.opendoor.com/doorstopsuite/

This will enhance the built-in firewall on OS X and give you additional tools. The enhanced logging capabilities are well worth it. You can also check the logs on the system for any accesses that were not supposed to be done.

Those logs are available in the “Console” program (included by Apple). You can check the “console.log” and the “system.log” files (they’re available on the left side panel of the program).

With all that, you should know what’s going on with your system, in “real-time” and also, see if anyone has accessed your computer while you weren’t looking.

Another little clue as to what activity has been going on with your computer since the last time you used it, you can use a program to check the last time files were “accessed” on your computer. Now, the operating system itself will access many things as it operates in the background, but it won’t access your own personal files; it only accesses its own stuff that it has to do in order to operate. If you check the last accesses (let’s say) in the last six hours or so, that will tell you if anyone has accessed anything on your computer while you were gone. You can see exactly where someone went, by looking at the “accesses” of the files...

I use “File Buddy” for this operation...
http://www.skytag.com/filebuddy/

I’ve had that one forever, it seems (along with these other programs, above, too. With File Buddy, you can search and access all sorts of things on your computer that you would never know was there.

I might mention one other program, too. If you want to see where programs are installing things (little file fragments here and there) and remove everything when you get rid of the program, you can use the program CleanApp

CleanApp webpage
http://synium.de/products/cleanapp/index.html

And also, although there is not much of a problem with viruses and other malware, I do have...

VirusBarrier X5 from Intego
http://www.intego.com/virusbarrier/

—

Check out all those, and if you do all of them, you’ll have your computer locked down pretty solid, for anyone or anything getting in and messing up stuff.

Of course, there are other utilities, too, for checking the health of your system and doing certain maintenance and stuff, but I’m not mentioning those. I’m pretty much talking about the security of the machine here...

[ P.S. — did you ever find that one-armed guy? :-) ... ]