[cynwoody]

The only way to protect against that sort of attack is full-disk encryption combined with a fail-safe way to clear RAM if the case is breached. Otherwise, if they steal your machine, they can browse its disk at their leisure. No need to recover or guess your password.

And why don't they just disable the Firewire port if the user is not logged in or if a password-protected screen saver is running?

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Disk encryption won’t help, once they get your password you’re toast. The only thing that could work would be individual file level encryption with a memorized key.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

The Thunderbolt interface is just as vulnerable as Firewire.

After doing some research i5 - i7 cpu’s have a protective, OS controlled, layer from this sort of DMA attack.

I’m not aware if OSX is providing this protection. It would be one hell of a marketing coup if they do? But then they would have to admit their older hardware was vulnerable.